Those who watched Apollo 13 ( not the movie 
) return live on on TV , how do you compare it with the chile rescue ?
I’m a bit too young to have seen Apollo 13, but I would imagine the stakes are a little different. No one at NASA, or anyone else, knew if the Astronauts would make it to earth, if their angle was correct, if the shield would hold out, etc.
While I’m sure the situation for the Chilean miners is not pleasant, they have been pretty safe underground, with enough food, water, tv and even clean clothes. With the rescue, things may not go according to plan, but it seems pretty safe to say (at least at this point) that they are all going to make it out eventually.
That said, I’m really happy those terrible weeks are now over for them and they can return to their families.
This. Apollo 13 barely made it back. They were cold, there was condensation on the electronics from their breath, Fred Haise was sick. Plus their immediately available resources (air/food/water) were limited, and they only got one shot at re-entry. If they screwed up just once, they were gonna die. The miners, OTOH, once the first supply shaft was drilled, it was clear that they could be resupplied indefinitely if any problems occurrred with the elevator rescue shaft.
All of which should not undermine (no pun intended) the amazing feat that is finally coming to fruition down there. 100 years ago these guys would certainly have died a miserable death far underground. First, the planning that put a stash of emergency food and water down there in the first place and trained these guys to go to it and hunker down until help arrived - and then the ability to accurately drill a survey shaft a half-mile down into the chamber where they were expected to be, and keep them alive while the rescue shaft got drilled - that’s all pretty damn cool.
It’s a hard comparison. When I first heard the news about Apollo 13, they kept emphasizing that the astronauts “were in no immediate danger,” while with the Chilean miners, everyone’s first thought was “those guys are dead.”
Then the situation reversed. With Apollo 13, we learned that the odds were decidedly against the astronauts, and the tension mounted every hour. Once the miners were found alive, it seemed clear (to me, anyway) that they’d eventually be rescued. It might take months, but it would happen, so the tension sort of decreased as time went by.
A closer comparion might be the rescue of Jessica McClure. She was an 18-month old who fell down a well too small for an adult to fit into. The rescuers had to try a relatively new technology to reach her, and the crisis was packed into less than three days of continuous coverage, more like Apollo 13.
But I agree that the Chilean miners are an inspiring and heoric story, and I wouldn’t minimize it.