If you were watching during the famous Apollo 13 broadcast in April 1970, you remember the fear. Three astronauts, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, were headed to the moon when something went terribly wrong. A nation held its breath and waited.
You probably also remember the line. “Houston, we have a problem.” It is one of the most quoted phrases in American history. There is just one thing: it was never quite said that way.
How It All Started
To understand how Apollo 13 happened, you have to go back to May 25, 1961. That was the day President John F. Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and made a promise. The United States, he said, should commit itself to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out.
It was a bold call to action, and it came straight out of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had already launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik 1, back in 1957. Then in 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space. America was behind, and Kennedy knew it.
The Apollo program was America’s answer. It worked. In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon with Apollo 11. Kennedy did not live to see it, but the mission he set in motion had succeeded.
The Night Everything Went Wrong
By the time Apollo 13 launched, public excitement had cooled. Congress had trimmed NASA’s budget. The mission felt almost routine, until it wasn’t.
Two days into the flight, the crew performed a routine stirring of the spacecraft’s oxygen tanks. A loud bang followed. Faulty wiring had caused an explosion that severely damaged the command module. The trip to the moon was over. Getting those three men home alive became the only thing that mattered.
So What Was Actually Said?
Here is where the famous line falls apart, in two ways.
First, it was not Jim Lovell who first told Mission Control about the crisis. It was Jack Swigert. Second, the actual words used were: “OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Past tense. Not present tense.
Where did the familiar version come from? The leading suspect is a 1974 television dramatization called Houston, We’ve Got a Problem. Whatever the origin, by 1995 the phrase had taken on a life of its own.
That was the year director Ron Howard released his acclaimed film Apollo 13, with Tom Hanks playing Jim Lovell. Howard knew the line was not historically accurate. He used it anyway, because audiences had heard the wrong version for so long that the right one would have sounded strange.
That says something about the power of a good story. Sometimes the version that sticks is not the version that happened. And sometimes, fifty-five years later, it is still worth setting the record straight.