“… our finest hour.” Intimately involved with both, I think Gene Kranz’s opinion is worthy of note.
But that contains a nod to Churchill, and so connotes a situation where the wolves are at the door. It wouldn’t really have made sense if applied to Apollo 11. I can’t imagine Krantz suggesting that a complete f-up like Apollo 13 was the best thing NASA had ever done, or any sort of milestone for the human race.
I think i’d probably go with Apollo 13. True, it’s the existence of Apollo 11 and what it stood for that made Apollo 13 possible. But as I see it, Apollo 11 represents a history of knowledge and all the best that could be put together in terms of technology and actually applying that knowledge; it’s application of knowledge with time spent and the best access possible to helping out. Apollo 13 is the application of that knowledge with probably the most severe handicaps possible in practical terms. 11 was like winning a race in a time that no-one’s even got near to before - 13 is coming in second when you have no legs.
Oh I agree alright that it’s a tough call to make because how do you compare such disparate goals? 13’s changed so radically with the explosion but I’m not sure its departure from the original quest wasn’t surpassed by what they did accomplish on the fly with everything going to hell in a handbasket. Had 13 gone according to plan then 11 would be the greatest ever, unquestioned. What they were able to assess, stopgap, alter, recalculate and patch with pretty much no margin for error was absolutely stunning though. The psychological effect of losing three astronauts forever to space could perhaps have dealt a blow just as devastating to future space exploration as landing on the moon did to encourage the effort.
Yeah, unlike the glorious age of space exploration we’re currently living in.
Very well put.
The mission plan was to get the astronauts to the moon, back out of the moon’s gravity and have just barely enough energy left to get themselves pointed in the right direction and, with little maneuverability in the last ten hours and no ability to maneuver in the last hour or so, slam into the atmosphere at 25000 miles per hour, hoping they did their calculations properly. I’m amazed by that – the only design they had the technology to come up with gradually removed more and more margin until, in the last hours, they could just barely direct the last 10,000 pounds of payload (out of the original 6 million) towards what they hoped was the right spot, with no second chances. That’s audacious, and thousands of engineers had to go to sleep each night terrified about every decision they made that favored schedule over margin. I can’t imagine maintaining focus under that amount of pressure. The cliche that “… if we can put a man on the moon, we can …” is meaningful because it showed that people could undertake an almost impossible goal and actually cooperate enough to achieve it. It still boggles my mind.
What Krantz meant was that their response to the Apollo 13 “f-up” was his team’s most remarkable performance. Difficult as the whole moon program was, it is something else entirely to have to throw out the “operating manuals” and improvise a difficult mission.
Which is why I cannot call either mission the greater achievement. They were both remarkable for quite different reasons.
Read Krantz’ Failure Is Not an Option and you will marvel that they ever pulled it off at all. They were pushing the envelope just as fast as the equipment could be developed (and it didn’t always work right the first time - remember all the problems they had with the Agena docking module?). With each flight they were doing things that simply had never been done before. They were damned lucky they lost just one crew along the way.
Another excellent book is “Apollo” by Murray and Cox. They describe some of the things that went wrong on Apollo 11, and spend a couple of chapters on Apollo 13. Their account is focused on everyone *except * the astronauts, with a lot of time with the designers and controllers.
I agree with it being impossible to say one is a greater achievement than the other. I see them as being two sides of the same coin. Apollo 11 was the achievement of the program - the accomplishment of the mission given to them by JFK. But Apollo 13 illustrated the capabilities of that program to deal with problems that were thought to be impossible to survive. The people, technologies, and systems that were developed to make Apollo 11 possible and successful were the same ones that made Apollo 13 survivable.
Historically, I think you would have to say that Apollo 11 was the greater achievement. If there were no landing and return, then Apollo 13 would be an interesting technical adventure, but not a lot else, at least from the perspective of history. But Apollo 13 was probably the more dramatic achievement and has been mentioned, a more transparent demonstration of what the people of the program could do. It was clearly a life-and-death situation that had people across the world glued to their radios and TVs, perhaps more so than Apollo 11.
You mean Apollo 1? I think that was three, unfortunately. 
For the record, everything didn’t go right during the Apollo 11 mission. There was a fair amount of seat-of-the-pants improvisation in that one, too. They came within a whisker of at least three catastrophic screwups that would have resulted in dead astronauts. (Ask Buzz Aldrin to show you the ballpoint pen.)
I vote for Apollo 11 being the greater achievement. Everything outside of low Earth orbit was uncharted territory, a trail to be blazed.
I have to agree with what others have said: Apollo 11 was not a routine mission just because it was successful. It was the equivalent of the Wright brother’s first flight - the mere fact that it was happening was a dramatic triumph.
With all respect to the fine work of the people involved with the Apollo 13 rescue, the people on the Apollo 11 mission were working with the same technology and they achieved everything they set out to do.
Not to take anything away from Apollo 13 and bringing those guys home, but I agree with those who say Apollo 11 was the greater achievement. I remember reading somewhere a statement (no idea how accurate) that was supposedly floating around as to the odds of a successful Apollo 11 mission (i.e. launch, dock, land, explore, launch, re-entry, safely back home) being something like 1 in 5. I remember that the designated landing site for Apollo 11 turned out to be rocky and they needed to search for somewhere to land…and were down to less than 30 seconds of fuel when they finally touched down.
-XT
And don’t forget that things went almost-kablooie with Apollo 11 too.
- Going long on the glide path
- Computer meltdown over too much data
- Boulders in the landing zone
- Less than 30 seconds of fuel left
- Screwing up the big speech
My vote is Apollo 11. With as much prep as was done on the Apollo program, they were the first to depend on their equipment to not make them “Eagle Crater” on the Moon and I don’t think that the psychological drain of being the first can be understated.
I think we all know which one Mr. Gorsky would pick.
Looks like you need to wipe your glasses. I said one crew, not one crewman. 
The remarkable thing about the LM computer hiccups during landing was that the last simulated landing they ran before the flight was devoted to computer error codes. The responsible controller, not being sufficiently familiar with the meaning and implications of the codes, hit the panic button and aborted the simulation. Whereupon the sim guys pointed out that the particular code they threw at the controllers didn’t warrant an abort. So the guys responsible for monitoring the LM computer got together, studied the error codes, and decided which ones they could live with and which ones required an abort.
And so it was that when, during Eagle’s landing, it’s computer started spitting out the same error code they had seen during the simulation (and also a similar code), Mission Control proceeded with the landing. Were it not for that simulation a week or so before, they would have aborted the landing. Never underestimate the utility of sheer luck.
While it’s true that all flights had their “funnies” (as the controllers called glitches), I think we can agree that 13’s were a few orders of magnitude beyond anything seen to that date. The second worst mission was Gemini 8, where a stuck thruster required them to terminate the mission. But in that case, all they had to do was fire the retros and land. Apollo 13 had to be kept going for three-and-a-half days, with much more serious problems.
That was a rather unwarranted snark. I read “crew” as singular, so shoot me. :rolleyes:
OK, then, but if Apollo 11 was a spit-and-bailing-wire near disaster kind of operation, how was NASA able to pull off five more Moon landings? Were major improvements made between the missions?
“Spit-and-bailing-wire” probably isn’t a fair characterization. Given that they were pushing the edge of technology, and given the complexity of their spacecraft, some malfunctions were inevitable on every flight. And there were equipment problems on every flight. Apollo 13 was merely the most spectacular in that regard (and even then it took a whole series of design errors, careless workmanship and nonstandard procedures to set up that oxygen tank explosion).
Anyway; on to your question. There were improvements in both procedures and equipment after every mission. One that comes to mind: after 13 they added a third oxygen tank to the Service Module and another battery to the Command Module. (One presumes they also replaced the thermostats in the O[sub]2[/sub] tanks with the correct type!)
Thank you, Neil Armstrong! (And can you land on the moon tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after …)