What began as a mission to land on the moon became history’s most harrowing space rescue after a technical failure forced the crew of Apollo 13 into a 200,000-mile race for survival.

Apollo 13 was supposed to be NASA’s third crewed mission to the surface of the moon, but nearly 56 hours into the flight, command module pilot John “Jack” Swigert radioed a troubling message to Mission Control: "OK, Houston, we've had a problem.

More than half a century after Apollo 13’s crippled spacecraft set an unplanned distance record in a desperate loop around the Moon, Artemis II is chasing that same frontier on purpose. NASA’s first crewed lunar voyage of the Artemis era is stretching Orion,

Apollo 13 is widely remembered as NASA’s “successful failure.” An onboard explosion crippled the command module just days into the mission, forcing astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise to abandon their planned lunar landing and convert the lunar module into a lifeboat for the journey home.

Wiseman, Hansen, pilot Victor Glover and Christina Koch were on track to pass as close as 4,070 miles (6,550 kilometers) to the moon, as their Orion capsule whips past it, hangs a U-turn and then heads back toward Earth. It will take them four days to get back, with a splashdown in the Pacific concluding their test flight on Friday.