# Which Apollo moon mission had the fewest problems? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 25, 2025, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-apollo-moon-mission-had-the-fewest-problems/1020141 "2025-06-25T22:28:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-apollo-moon-mission-had-the-fewest-problems/1020141/1 "2025-06-25T22:28:31Z")
Apollo 11 had a lot of first-to-do-it problems and had about 60 seconds of fuel left when Armstrong had to bunny hop over some boulders. Apollo 12 got struck by lightning twice and if not for John Aaron’s “Try SCE to AUX.” and Alan Bean knowing what switch he was talking about, the mission would have had to been scrubbed. Apollo 13 … we all know about that. Apollo 14 had a short that could have aborted the moon landing at an inopportune time. Thinking about how close all of those missions came to NOT landing on the Moon (and Apollo 13 did not), were their any missions that went off without a hitch? Were there any that were relatively problem free? ---
**Author:** ![Marvin\_the\_Martian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/marvin_the_martian/32/2898_2.png) [@Marvin\_the\_Martian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marvin_the_Martian)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-apollo-moon-mission-had-the-fewest-problems/1020141/2 "2025-06-25T22:42:57Z")
> [@Apollo Missions 11 - 17: Glitches and Issues](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/apollo-missions-11-17-glitches-and-issues/832708/6): > > If the OP hasn’t done so already, pick up [A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaikin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_on_the_Moon). It goes into a lot of this stuff. Off the top of my head… Apollo 11: Armstrong switching to “manual” during the landing wasn’t exactly a glitch. Theoretically, the LM could reach the surface without any intervention (except possibly shutting down the engine, I’m not certain…). But the astronauts generally planned to take over control at some point prior to touchdown. And I have “manual” in quotes because there wer… ---
**Author:** ![Llama\_Llogophile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@Llama\_Llogophile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Llama_Llogophile)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2025, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-apollo-moon-mission-had-the-fewest-problems/1020141/3 "2025-06-25T22:43:06Z")
I’d say Apollo 15 got the most bang for the buck. Not a lot of operational problems. They had trouble with the drill, but so did the other missions. The rover had a loss of steering redundancy on day one which did not re-occur. Apart from that, they got a little overheated. Jim Irwin, in particular, had his water tube kink up during one of the long moonwalks and got dehydrated. And they had the rover start sliding down a steep incline at one point, but it never got away from them. Of course, they had the postage stamp dust up afterward, though. But Apollo 15 met or exceeded most mission objectives and never got into any real trouble. Apollo 17 also went pretty well. Gene Cernan accidentally tore a fender off the rover, but they fixed it the next day. This is also an interesting question as applied to the Skylab program (which also used Apollo hardware). The first manned flight was very dicy, with the crew fixing a lot of stuff that had gone wrong on the launch of the workshop. Second mission went very well despite a dead thruster on the rendevous. A lot of BS has been written about the third and final mission. They didn’t actually go “on strike”, but they did have to solve some scheduling problems during a frank discussion with Mission Control.