Apollo 13: Survival review – fascinating, if clinical, retelling of space history

Netflix’s archival documentary relives the near-fatal explosion of 1970 with remarkable and urgent footage

On paper, the survival of three astronauts aboard Apollo 13, a Nasa spacecraft bound for the moon and imperiled by a near-fatal explosion in April 1970, is nothing short of astounding. The explosion, over two days and 210,000 miles into the mission, nearly drained the three-part spacecraft of oxygen and electrical power. The three astronauts – Fred Haise, Jack Swigert and mission commander Jim Lovell – were forced to spend four harrowing, near-suffocating days in a lunar module meant for just two people and 45 hours, with just a few light bulbs’ worth of power. The unprecedented and untested maneuvers to get them home – transferring flight data by hand to the “life boat” module, catapulting off the moon’s orbit, manually aiming an unpredictable rocket blast at the earth – were each dicey and high-risk, requiring exact precision to avoid certain death. The compounded odds of their survival were slim.

As arranged in Apollo 13: Survival, a new documentary about the flawed mission, these facts somehow seem much drier, though meticulously and sumptuously rendered through restored archival material. Director Peter Middleton re-creates a play-by-play of the six-day mission – aboard Apollo 13, at mission control in Houston and in living rooms across the country – primarily through archival recordings, old interviews with the crew and never-before-seen footage of the spacecraft, ground control and the astronauts’ families. The result is a faithful and explicative, though at times too clinical, depiction of an ill-fated chapter of the US space program that seems as fit for a classroom as it is on-couch entertainment.

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