Did You Know?

NASA's "worm" logo was not developed until 1975.
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"Mr. Coffee" brand coffee makers weren't introduced until 1972.
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In the opening sequence with Apollo 1, the crew uses a black keyboard (Block II). The keyboard on Apollo 1 was white (Block I).
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The USS New Orleans (a stand-in for the USS Iwo Jima) is shown with CIWS (Close In Weapons System) that was not in commission until 1977 when tested on the USS Bigelow.
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The Mavericks band formed in 1989, 19 years after the Apollo 13 flight.
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When Marilyn Lovell calls NASA after the explosion, she is talking on a handset which has an RJ (Registered Jack) style connector. These style jacks were not introduced until the mid 1970s as ordered by the FCC.
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When Jack Swigert ('Kevin Bacon') receives a phone call that he will be replacing Kenneth Mattingly, he answers a rotary phone with a handset having a modular phone plug. Modular connectors were not in use until 1976.
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The TV guide Blanche Lovell is holding while looking for the Apollo 13 TV broadcast appears to show Beavis and Butt-Head.
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The Apollo 13 Spacecraft and Launch Vehicle is depicted as being delivered to the Launch Pad on April 9, 1970 - two (2) days before launch. Much more "pad time" was required, and Apollo 13 was actually delivered to Launch Pad 39A on December 15, 1969.
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News reporters outside of Marilyn Lovell's home during landing voices are out of sync with the video (observed on the IMAX version.
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Visible in the background of mission control once the crisis starts, collecting the audio of some of the controllers. This could be because the command center was being televised (which is not mentioned at all, so it probably wasn't), but it is not seen in any later shot of the command center in that scene, including the following wide shot.
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As Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, Walter Cronkite says the Apollo 11 landing is 18 months after the tragic Apollo 1 launchpad fire. It was actually 30 months after.
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The words "We have cleared the tower" are heard before the rocket has cleared the tower.
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When Apollo 13 is due for re-entry we briefly see Gene Kranz with a fastened collar and tie. A minute or so later he is seen fastening his collar and tightening his loose tie.
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Just after the explosion, when Jim Lovell is saying "we've got multiple caution and warnings, Houston," the MET clock (Mission Elapsed Time in hours, minutes, and seconds) is plainly visible reading 091:34:10. When next seen less than a minute later, it has backed up to 056:55:12.
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Shortly after lift-off, as the crew are removing their gloves and helmets. In the first shot, Jack Swigert is seen removing his gloves and glove liners. The next shot shows Swigert removing his helmet while still wearing his white glove liners.
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Before Gene Kranz calls for people to "Listen Up People" in mission control, we see Deke Slayton move from the back row to CAP COM row 3 times.
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Shortly before re-entry, a NASA worker says, " Velocity now reading 34,802 feet per second, range to go 26,025 nautical miles," and Gene Kranz has his top button done up and his tie pulled up. Before and after this shot, Kranz's shirt and tie are undone.
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The drawing Gene Kranz makes on the chalkboard change shape between scenes.
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In the shot over Fred Haise's shoulder he is reading the letter and looking at the pictures of Mary Haise, you see him fold up the letter and place it and the pictures in the green envelope. In the next shot when Lovell grabs the floating picture of Mary, you see Haise folding the letter again and putting it in the envelope again.
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When Jim Lovell and Fred Haise are adding ballast, the video camera gets passed down twice.
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A bearded crew member is visible in the lower right corner of the screen towards the end of the movie, about the time Jack Swigert jettisons the service module.
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When the astronauts are getting their suits put on for the launch, someone asks Jack Swigert "Do you need more air?" Swigert shakes his head. As the camera zooms in slowly, a reflection of three crew members can be seen in his helmet.
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Whilst on the way back to Earth, a view out of a window shows the Moon with around 50% of the far side showing. Only a small percentage of the far side should be visible at that point.
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After the party, Jim Lovell holds his thumb in front the gibbous moon. Then, telling Marilyn Lovell where to find "her" mountain, he says the Sea of Tranquility is "where the shadow crosses the white part." The terminator was in fact near the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, but the moon was less than half full; it's depicted in the scene as gibbous, with the terminator on the other side.
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The astronauts are shown looking at Mare Tranquilitatis, then crossing from sunlight into shadow, followed by loss of signal, all within seconds. In fact at loss of signal they had been in the moon's shadow for some time and were nowhere near Mare Tranquilitatis.
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During the trip to the moon, a full moon and a full earth can be seen from the windows of the spacecraft. If the spaceship was between the earth and the moon, it would not have been possible to see the "full phases" of the earth and the moon at the same time. One of the two would have to have the shadow dark side facing the spacecraft.
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In the sequence of Jim Lovell on the lunar surface, the Earth is shown just above the horizon, implying the location on the Moon is somewhere around the edge of the portion that we can see from Earth, but the Fra Mauro landing site was much closer to the centre of the Moon's visible disk, so the Earth should be much higher in the sky.
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In Houston the moon set that night at about midnight CDT, while the Apollo 11 astronauts were returning to their Lunar Module; hence it would not be visible after the party at the Lovells'.
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Just after acquisition of signal, Houston tells the astronauts that their speed is "approximately 7,062 feet per second" and their altitude above the moon is 56 nautical miles. That speed is 500 ft/s below lunar escape velocity at that altitude, hence impossible on a free return trajectory. In fact, any free return trajectory symmetrical about the moon-earth line would put them at over 100 nautical miles altitude at acquisition of signal.
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The Apollo 1 fire DID NOT initiate with a switch throw, as this movie depicts. During the Accident Investigation, this was a possibility which was dismissed after a thorough investigation.
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Notwithstanding that this movie used dramatic license to make a better story, a few points should be clarified, particularly concerning the portrayals of Astronaut Fred Haise and the Grumman Corporation: Fred Haise was considered one of the best and brightest of his group (1966); the scenes where he gives Jack Swigert a dirty look in the Simulator, blames Swigert for the Accident, and nearly screws up the course correction maneuver are not supported by any historical account available to this contributor. Grumman Corporation Personnel worked as hard as anyone else on the team to bring the Apollo 13 Crew home safely; the display of "no can do" attitude shown in the movie is not supported by any historical account available to this contributor. This movie also neglects the contributions of Astronaut Charlie Duke; by the time of the Accident, he was no longer contagious but still feeling unwell. He got out of his sick bed to help devise new Lunar Module Procedures, just as Kenneth Mattingly is shown doing for the Command Module - in fact, Duke helped devise the course correction maneuver in the Lunar Module Simulator.
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The Mission Clock is not supposed to start until the Saturn V rocket lifts off the launch pad.
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The five F-1 engines do NOT start simultaneously as depicted. The center (inboard) engine starts first, followed by pairs at 200 millisecond intervals. Additionally, they're depicted as CO2 fire extinguishers. In reality the sequence began with a narrow stream of liquid oxygen falling through the combustion injectors.
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Jim Lovell says "If I'm in the left-hand seat when the call comes up, *I* stir the tanks." The cryo tank switches and gauges were actually between the middle and right-hand seats where they could be reached by the lunar module pilot (Fred Haise) in the right seat, acting as CSM flight engineer, monitoring power and environmental systems. The left seat controls and displays were for real-time piloting.
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When Apollo 13 goes around the Moon and experiences loss of signal with Mission Control, they are also shown going into the Moon's shadow. This would only happen if the Moon's phase was full, which it wasn't.
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The TV camera in the CSM/LM did not have a viewfinder as depicted in the film. Nor did it have a red light to show it was on. A custom modified mini B&W monitor on the top of the camera allowed the astronauts to see where they were shooting. Such a device was used on the color camera in the CSM since Apollo 10.
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When the Lunar Module is jettisoned, the docking probe is supposed to remain with the lunar module. Here it is seen still attached to the CM.
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In the film, Jim Lovell suggests using the cross hairs on the window of the CM and line it up with the terminator line of the earth as a procedure to navigate without the computer. This appears to be an idea "plucked out of the air" by Lovell, and Houston have to confer in order to see if it would work. In reality this procedure was practiced by Lovell on Apollo 8 in preparation for just such a malfunction of the computer and Houston had full procedural guidelines in place. The actual problem facing Lovell was the fact that because of no gravity the debris from the explosion was circulating the craft and was blocking the windows making the procedure very difficult.
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Several times on the "outbound" portion of the flight, the Apollo spacecraft is seen heading directly towards the moon. If this happened in real life, they would miss the moon by tens of thousands of miles. Since it takes 4 days to get to the moon, they would have to be heading towards a point well ahead of where the moon was at the beginning of their flight. In other words, they have to aim towards where the moon is going to be in 4 days, and that would not be directly ahead of them.
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In the opening sequence, the Apollo 1 crew is shown being sealed into their capsule by an outward opening hatch. One of the main reasons the crew perished in the fire was that the Block I Apollo capsule in service at that time was equipped with an inward opening hatch. In only a few seconds the buildup of pressure caused by the fire made such an escape hatch nearly impossible to open.
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During the course correction sequence in the L.E.M., Jack Swigert is shown floating around weightless. When the engine is burning, the spacecraft is accelerating and those inside would not be in a zero-g environment.
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The Apollo 13 crew are all shown wearing U.S. Naval Aviator wings on their flight suits. While these wings were correct for Jim Lovell (U.S. Navy) and Fred Haise (U.S. Marine Corps), Jack Swigert actually served in the U.S. Air Force.
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When performing the Lithium Hydroxide canister adaptation, Capcom asks for the cover to be ripped off the flight plan. This is later used to stop the bag being sucked into the canister, but instead an EVA cue card was used. Secondly, there is a short scene when Jim Lovell states he has inserted a sock into the canister. Although it was suggested that a piece of sock be used by Houston (among other suggestions), the actual item used was a piece of towel.
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In April 1970, Jim Lovell's daughter can be seen holding The Beatles' "Let it Be" album, which wasn't released until May 1970.
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The film contains an explicit notice that "certain characters and events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes", so these changes are not goofs. For instance, the Lovells did not host a party during the Apollo 11 landing; Jim Lovell and Fred Haise were filmed sitting to Capcom Charlie Duke's left in mission control during the landing. Kenneth Mattingly was also at Mission Control when the Apollo 13 accident happened, and was not really the person who devised the power-up procedure. There are various other minute contradictions of history and the film is prey to a large number of factual errors due to the large volume of documentary footage/evidence from the actual event. This is not a documentary.
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After Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) has drawn the diagram on the blackboard, he exclaims that 45 hours is not sufficient for the spacecraft to cover the distance between the Moon and the Earth (it is actually about 90 hours/4 days). John Young (Ben Marley) explains that the batteries would die out in 16 hours (and not 45 hours as was being presumed till then) at the current rate of consumption (60 Amps; Amperes, a measure of electric current). He suggests that the consumption be brought down to 12 Amps (about a fifth of the current consumption rate) by shutting down all non-critical systems in the spacecraft. It would be fair to deduce then, that: (i) The batteries would now last 5 times longer (about 16 * 5 = 80 hours), almost enough for the spacecraft to re-enter Earth's atmosphere. (ii) The charge in the batteries was somewhere between 900 Ah and 1000 Ah (Ampere-Hour, a measure of charge in a battery); drawing 60 Amps from the battery for 16 hours would give 60 Amps * 16 hours = 960 Ah. However, when Kenneth Mattingly (Gary Sinise) enters the scene to simulate the re-entry procedures, John asks his team to keep an eye on the ammeter (used to measure the strength of current, and labeled AMPERES) in the simulator, such that the moving black pointer never crosses the 20 Amps notch (shown by the fixed red pointer). The 12 Amps benchmark was for the Lunar Module, giving the power requirements to get back towards Earth (at this point the Command Module was drawing zero Amps, as it was completely powered down). The 20 Amps were the power requirements for the Command Module, which were only required for the last few hours before re-entry. (The idea of reversing the umbilical flow between the two was to allow the LM power to be used to perform some of the intermediate steps for the CM start-up, since it was assumed that the LM batteries would have enough charge to do so after the prior power conservation steps taken, and to reduce the strain on the CM batteries.)
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During the re-entry simulation with Jack Swigert, Fred Haise communicates with Houston after they confirmed radio blackout.
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The downward view toward the rocket rising from the pad shows cars in the parking lots. During an actual launch, the pad was completely evacuated and the lots would have been empty.
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When shown from ground level the mobile transporter is obviously not carrying anything.
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In some cold scenes in the LEM, breath is visible. The warm breath rises, which wouldn't happen in a weightless environment.
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The orientation of the spacecraft during the mid-course correction burn is not consistent to what the crew was seeing out of the Lunar Module's windows.
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Twice in the film, Jim Lovell covers the moon with his left thumb. A different person's thumb is used in each as the nail and joint creases are quite different.
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