1) Apollo 13 has a trace of this mooniness, the mystical nostalgia that seized most of the astronauts who got there and back. This cosmic optimism, the movie suggests, is one of the reasons for spending billions of dollars on the Apollo program: something wonderful is out there. (Richard Corliss)

2) This movie was going to get it right. And so it did--as right as any movie is ever going to in portraying an event where much of the drama cannot be captured visually. When you read that the Apollo people approve of Apollo 13, it is not just flackery. They really do. (Charles Murray)

3) The picture has a higher energy quotient than Crimson Tide but ultimately succumbs, contra the movie's theme and the best intentions of all involved, to the doldrums of the technological drama which all but submerges the human factor. (Andy Pawelczak)

4) It is a technically accomplished piece about technology and truelife adventure. (John Simon)

5) Just because of this picture's accuracy, it's important to draw a line. On one side are the facts, of ingenious engineering and exceptional courage; on the other, the film as film. And as film, Apollo 13 is dull. (Stanley Kauffmann)

6) Any American under 40, having lived an entire lifetime in the grip of acrid cynicism, could easily dismiss the space program as the most expensive publicity stunt of all time. . . . It was, however, America's last frantic grasp at 19th-century optimism battered by a depression, temporarily restored by a war and all but obliterated in the years after the bomb, confronting a stalemate in Korea and Europe, Communist spies (real and imagined) at home, a war of dubious merit that could not be won and would not be lost, assassination and riots, the undisputed lead of the Soviet Union in manned space flight. (Richard Blake)

7) Hanks gives another great performance -- instinctive and assured. He humanizes the hardware and the spacespeak, shows feeling in Lovell's scenes with his children and wife, Marilyn (a touching Kathleen Quinlan), and subtly draws us into the heartache of a dedicated man who won't fulfill his dream to set foot on the moon. (Peter Travers)

8) Only nine months since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's "giant leap for mankind," the Apollo moon missions already seemed to have lost some of their magic. Only Americans, perhaps, could become jaded about trips to another world. (Andrew Chaikin)

9) Remarkably, not one frame of film was lifted from documentaries of NASA footage. All effects were created from scratch. (Richard Corliss)

10) Proud of its fidelity to external detail, the movie wants us to think it's completely apolitical; it's simply telling a true story of American ingenuity. (John Powers)

11) It's commonly accepted that space ceased to be transcendental the moment that Armstrong took his one giant leap for the recyclable soundbite. Apollo 13, with some degree of regret, shows space travel as being firmly on a human footing. Its nicest touch is that Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin appear in a very domestic light--they're brought in as jovial neighbours to distract Jim Lovell's old mom from the Apollo 13 crisis. It reminds you that, although they always seemed destined for demi-god status, in the cosmic icon stakes they somehow ended up lagging somewhere behind Yuri Gagarin and Laika the dog. (Jonathan Romney)

12) I especially regretted one omission and one flat-out misrepresentation. The omission was flight director Glynn Lunney's performance. Without slighting Kranz's role, the world should remember that it was Glynn Lunney, barely visible in the movie, who took over the flight director's console 69 minutes after the explosion. It was he who for the 10 hours of his team's shift orchestrated a masterpiece of improvisation that moved the astronauts safely to the lunar module while sidestepping a dozen potential catastrophes that could have doomed them. (Charles Murray)

13) The problem with all of this is that the drama in the ship isn't all that compelling. The astronauts are too passive--all they really have to do is keep their heads, endure and carry out the directions of the whiz-kids at Mission Control--and their interpersonal relations are minimal. Lovell and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), the two family men, distrust the newcomer to the crew, swinging bachelor Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), who has to prove himself in the course of the crisis. And that's about it. (Andy Pawelczak)

14) Apollo 13 is an extraordinarily entertaining movie. Director Ron Howard combined a powerful narrative with fine acting, an impressive attention to detail in everything from dialogue to set design, and stunning special effects to produce a compelling representation of a memorable event in the past. But this film is without historical context. It is an inside-NASA story, involving nothing other than what occurs in space, at the Cape and Houston, and within the family circle of the astronauts.
(Tom Crouch)

15) There are no characters, no room for any substantive character development. Everyone knew and millions adored the people in the Star Trek series and in Star Wars. Even The Right Stuff gave its people some leeway as people. But Apollo 13 is staffed with human puppets. (Stanley Kauffmann)

16) John Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon supplied the road map the nation needed to get it through its terminal megrims. As the space program advanced through its successive stages--Mercury, Gemini, Apollo--it began to restore America's faith at least in the superiority of its technology. (Richard Blake)

17) In honoring a failed mission, Apollo 13 celebrates the rebel part of the American character that won't accept boundaries. Bob Dole may not see this as the right stuff. That's no excuse for the rest of us. (Peter Travers)

18) Howard’s goal was meticulous realism, in everything from the arc of emotion to the gizmos on the module dashboards. (Richard Corliss)

19) Star Tom Hanks, a lifelong space aficionado, insisted on meticulous attention down to the smallest detail. Co-star Kevin Bacon reported, "Tom Hanks wouldn’t push a button unless it was the right button to push." Producer Brian Grazer, on the other hand, admits that he occasionally wanted to shout: "Push the f—ing button!" (Tom Crouch)

20) "Apollo 13" has the makings of a masterpiece. Three astronauts zoom through space, trapped in a dying module, certain that they, too, are going to die. And as they race along, everything is right in front of them: their lives, their memories, their regrets, the whole meaning of the universe. It's hard to imagine a story that's richer or more profound -- here are men who see the dark side of infinity. Unfortunately, "Apollo 13" isn't about any of this. It's about how these guys got home. (John Powers)

21) Even more heroic, frontiersmen-like characteristics were attributed to the astronauts and flight controllers. Anthony Lewis compared the astronauts to Magellan and the Wright Brothers -- “opening new ways for all mankind.” (Susan Opt)

22) Hats off to Ron Howard, who pulled off something that no one else has done in the last quarter--century: getting large numbers of Americans to appreciate the splendor of the Apollo program, the one achievement of this century that we can be sure will still be part of the history books a thousand years from now. (Charles Murray)

23) By midnight the lander was activated and Swigert had shut down the last of Odyssey's systems. With his ship now dark and lifeless, Swigert went to join his crewmates. They paused in their work long enough to see him floating into the lander's tiny cabin, looking forlorn. He told Lovell and Haise, "It's up to you now." (Andrew Chaikin)

24) Tom Hanks, who has the aw-shucks, all-American charm with which to turn even a fictional half-wit into a hero, has no trouble making a real-life hero such as Jim Lovell enormously appealing. (John Simon)

25) Technically, the film is marvelous. We're told that not one foot of actual NASA footage was used: everything was re-created. The weightless episodes were shot in a special NASA plane that is used for training astronauts. Ron Howard was the director, but it's the big technical crew that gave this picture what power it has. (Stanley Kauffmann)

26) That the airborne trio had to make some risky, resolute moves, and that ingenuity and heroism, above and below, had to work wonders is, for me, undercut when all this centers on buttons, knobs, and switches, on a technology I find it hard to get with. (John Simon)

27) At that moment, each man knew the awful truth: The mission was over. Without all three fuel cells working, the men were forbidden even to go into lunar orbit. Lovell's heart sank as he realized he wasn't going to land on the moon. (Andrew Chaikin)

28) And with doom dogging their flight, newsfolk and viewers finally paid attention. Imminent death is great for ratings. (Richard Corliss)

29) The movie's never better than when no human being is on screen. (John Powers)

30) There is indeed a degree of bitter humour, largely directed at the blase media of the time, who refused to cover the mission until it became a life-and-death nail-biter. (Jonathan Romney)

31) The space program, in turn, cultivated popular participation. Americans adopted its jargon as their own: launch pad, count down, all systems are go, A.O.K. They breathlessly told neighbors about a splashdown, as though heralding a birth in the family and discussed problems with retro-rockets and heat shields as though they actually knew what they were talking about. (Richard Blake)

32) We know that the three astronauts headed for the moon and, although one oxygen tank blew up on them, came back alive; thus no real suspense. (John Simon)

33) The near disaster of Apollo 13 in the spring of 1970 threatened to end the national euphoria. Just when space flight had become so routine that the public began to lose interest and television networks would no longer pre-empt prime-time programming for coverage, mechanical failure endangered not only the lives of the three men on board, but the entire national ego. These were not merely three pilots; they were part of the family. Their danger and survival provided a drama that touched everyone personally. (Richard Blake)

34) The triumph belonged to these Earthbound heroes as much as to the astronauts years later, many would call Apollo 13 NASA's finest hour. (Andrew Chaikin)

35) A NASA spokesman admitted, "The film has been very helpful." (Tom Crouch)

36) This particular true story seems tailor-made for today's conservative mood -- its Angry White Men and its nostalgia for a homogeneous America that never was. Ours may be the first country ever to pine for its lost glory while still being the most powerful nation on Earth, and in its rose-colored images of bygone days, "Apollo 13" makes such nostalgia seem like a rational political position. (John Powers)

37) The film-makers had unprecedented access to NASA facilities and advice in a deal that has handsomely paid back the budget-beleaguered space agency in good PR. (Jonathan Romney)

38) Americans looked across the Pacific and saw defeat. They looked at their campuses and saw revolt; at their inner cities and saw flames. For inspiration there was nowhere to look but up. (Richard Corliss)

39) Children will get a good deal out of the picture (allowing for Bacon's pre-flight sexual sorties), but only the youngest among them will think it novel. For myself, an old paradox came back hauntingly. All this talk about space, about immensity, yet space travel puts human beings in claustrophobic confinement--space helmets and compact spacecraft. (Stanley Kauffmann)

40) Marilyn Lovell (Kathleen Quinlan) is the ideal NASA wife, balancing her conflicting roles as mother and public-relations agent for the space program, (Richard Blake)

41) Less than eight months later, in January 1971, Apollo 14 lifted off with three redesigned oxygen tanks and other improvements, to complete the mission that Lovell's crew had been denied and begin the scientific exploration of the moon in earnest. (Andrew Chaikin)

42) NASA found all this voodoo laughable in the extreme, and so did Lovell. As far as the commander of the mission was concerned, his trip to Fra Mauro was a scientific expedition, no more, no less. There was no room for a lot of superstitious claptrap, and the motto he chose for the official mission patch reflected that belief. Harking back to his Annapolis days, Lovell borrowed the Navy’s motto, Ex tridens scientia (‘From the sea, knowledge’) and changed it slightly, to Ex luna scientia. To Lovell, the acquisition of knowledge seemed like pretty good reason to make a lunar trip. (Lovell and Kluger 81)

43) Watching this movie, you won't see the least shadow of women's lib, the civil rights movement or that troublesome war in Southeast Asia. The America of 1970 is shown to be happy, harmonious and lily white -- the Mayberry of Ron Howard's youth. Those who lived through the late '60s and early '70s will recall that the period was actually tricky, contradictory, kaleidoscopic. Even as Apollo 13 floundered in space, the United States was busy invading Cambodia -- less than a month later came the killings at Kent State.
(John Powers)

44) Curiously, gripping as it is, Apollo 13 is a non-drama. It's a suspense story whose outcome we already know, so its appeal lies entirely in putting us through the events for ourselves. (Jonathan Romney)

45) Patriotic viewers of this film, which opened on the Fourth of July, will get more uplift from it than from a thousand fireworks displays. (John Simon)

46) "Apollo 13," directed by Ron Howard, recreates the spirit of the era beautifully, with neither condescension or cynicism. (Richard Blake)

47) A quarter of a century later, the mission that NASA hoped the public would forget is remembered as one of the shining moments of the Apollo program, and a defining event of the entire era. Much of the credit for that goes to director Ron Howard’s blockbuster hit, Apollo 13. (Tom Crouch)

48) In ’60s newspapers and magazines, the Apollo astronauts were portrayed as heroes of the old world; God-fearin’, jut-jawed, steely-eyed misslemen, gazing into the skies they would soon conquer. (Richard Corliss)

49) Although the movie's publicity trumpets its historical accuracy, the movie itself celebrates the paradisiacal America invoked by Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan -- an America where men were men, women were subservient, and people of color kept out of the damn way. And what of the satanic '60s counterculture? In one of the most telling subplots, Apollo 13 vanquishes the Jefferson Airplane. (John Powers)

50) Apollo 13 nevertheless functions quite adequately as a theme-park experience that lets you feel what it might be like to be marooned in space with no certainty of returning. . . . When the astronauts are saved, there's no catharsis, surprise or moral payoff--simply the feeling we'd have if we were stepping out of a fun capsule at Universal City. We heave a sign of relief and head for the cold drinks stand. (Jonathan Romney)

51) How the men at NASA headquarters toiled like Trojans to help bring them back is impressive to watch, but resembles too many fiction films we have seen. (John Simon)

52) An Explosion in space does not fit into the flight plans of the computer nerds at Mission Control. Flight director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris), leads a battalion of technicians, neatly uniformed in crew cuts, dark-rimmed glasses and pocket protectors for their ball point pens. The nerds break lock step and discover that they have the imagination and ingenuity to correct an on-going series of unprecedented equipment failures.
(Richard Blake)

53) The spacecraft was designed with so many redundant components that this particular combination of glitches was unthinkable. No one would have imagined the emergency developing aboard Apollo 13. (Andrew Chaikin)

54) As Time magazine reviewer Richard Corliss suggests, Apollo 13 ultimately “pays tribute to the endangered American virtues of individual ingenuity and team spirit.” (Tom Crouch)

55) While there's nothing nearly so egregious in "Apollo 13" . . . this is a movie that comes back from space carrying nothing for an audience to take home with it. Hollywood, we have a problem. (John Powers)

56) What's missing, curiously, is a sense of what the astronauts have left behind on earth, and what they hope to return to. The 1970 we see is never real, but as much a simulation as the journey itself. Space is something we can handle, but the past really is terra incognita. (Jonathan Romney)

57) The film humanizes the crew, and thus personalizes their danger. (Richard Blake)

58) Lovell told himself that Odyssey must reach Earth at all costs, even if he and his crew didn't survive. Better to burn up in the atmosphere, he thought, than to end as a permanent memorial to the space program. (Andrew Chaikin)

59) Things had quieted down considerably at the EECOM station, where the crisis that had become a death watch had now become a postmortem. The screen that had been blinking with bulletins from the dying Odyssey had now essentially gone flat-line, with zeros and blank spots appearing where oxygen and power readings had once been. (Lovell and Kluger 140)

60) Strangely enough, "Apollo 13" doesn't ask even the rudimentary questions about the astronaut's inner lives. What does going to the moon really mean to Jim Lovell (Hanks)? What agonies of regret haunt the mind of Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), whose hugely pregnant wife awaits his return? And cocky, womanizing Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon): What fantasies skitter through his mind during those long hours in space? The movie treats such things as beside the point. This lack of curiosity is stunning: Don't you wonder what happens to the soul of a man lost in space? (John Powers)

61) Yet amid all the critical raves, I have seen no discussion of the cause of the near-loss of three gallant lives: the malfunction of a superannuated coil that should have been replaced well before liftoff. (John Simon)

62) Many elements converge to make "Apollo 13" a truly superior adventure movie. The camera moves continually and purposefully in the cramped spaces of the space craft, the family living room and mission control. The images are never static, never dull. (Richard Blake)

63) Around the world, the voices of the three astronauts in peril were heard by millions of people who anxiously followed this cliffhanger. Prayers were said in the Vatican, at a gathering of 100,000 in India, and at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Not since the first moon landing had so many people paused in their daily lives to follow a spaceflight. Apollo 13, which Jim Lovell had thought would be a historical footnote, was anything but. (Andrew Chaikin)

64) Ron Howard has given us a universal tale of heroism and determinism. A deeper and more profound connection to the times would have transformed it into history. (Tom Crouch)

65) Even when faced with death in the far reaches of space, the astronauts in "Apollo 13" turn white-bread dullness into a kind of religion -- they make Orrin Hatch look like Dennis Rodman. It is true, of course, that the Apollo astronauts were notoriously boring (NASA insisted on it). (John Powers)

66) Apollo 13 is an account of human bravery so everyday and pragmatic it's altogether banal. It's a story of failure snatched from the jaws of defeat--a story in which nothing really happens. (Jonathan Romney)

67) The lander had been designed to keep two men alive for 45 hours, time enough for Lovell and Haise to land on the moon, make two moonwalks, and rejoin Swigert in lunar orbit. Now it would have to support all three men for anywhere from 77 to 100 hours, depending on what kind of rocket firing the astronauts made. (Andrew Chaikin)

68) Ron Howard’s film pays tribute to the signal and endangered American virtues of individual ingenuity and team spirit. (Richard Corliss)

69) The film’s simple message amounts to: where there is no way, there is a will. (Paul Marcus)

70) Discusses the main obstacles of the script, which were twofold: the specific task of making technical aspects of the space mission comprehensible (and entertaining); and the more encompassing issue of finding a dramatic storyline for the real-life events. Specifically discusses how the writers went about overcoming these obstacles, with the majority of the article told from John Sayles’ perspective, the individual who completely reshaped the script but didn’t receive any credit. (E. Deidre Pribram)

71) In these cynical times, when exploitation of violence in movies is the norm, it was great to make a movie about real, ordinary people who do extraordinary things. (William Broyles, qtd. in Corliss)

72) The apogee of American know-how and teamwork, the program could, at the flick of a wrong switch, careen from triumph to tragedy. In this job, success meant you forged the ultimate frontier; failure meant you died with the whole world watching. (Richard Corliss)

73) "Apollo 13" makes the same kind of emotional appeal to its audience as did "Forrest Gump" -- it turns history into a soothing fairy tale. (John Powers)

74) Even the awards did not begin to suggest the enormous impact of Apollo 13, however, or the extent to which it had touched deep chords in the American psyche. (Tom Crouch)

75) The cast includes some gifted actors: Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Kevin Bacon and, one of the best, Gary Sinise. But for all they have to do here, their parts could have been filled with four modestly competent call-ups from the Screen Actors Guild. (Stanley Kauffmann)

76) The understated script, direction, and acting deserve praise. (John Simon)

77) Whatever his commitment to accuracy in the presentation of technical detail, Ron Howard clearly intended to produce a fable for the 1990s, a nostalgic reminder of a time, not so long ago, when Americans accepted a difficult challenge and saw it through a triumphant conclusion. (Tom Crouch)

78) With less than a day to go until Apollo 13 reached the moon, and everything going according to plan, there was so little to do that earlier, Capcom Joe Kerwin had quipped to the astronauts, "We're bored to tears down here." No one knew that Apollo 13 was a time bomb about to explode, and that a life-and-death struggle was about to begin. (Andrew Chaikin)

79) In Tom Hanks' Lovell it has a hero for our time--a stolid, straight-arrow family man who still vibrates to the siren call of the frontier. (Andy Pawelczak)

80) The success of Ron Howard's Apollo 13--it has so far taken $200 million worldwide--is less to do with our fascination with space than with a collective nostalgia for a time when space was fascinating. (Jonathan Romney)

81) The set decoration, with its vintage television sets, and the costuming capture the look and spirit of the early 1970's. Remember when men wore ties and short-sleeved white shirts to work in the summer? How else could they carry all those ballpoint pens? (Richard Blake)

82) Ron Howard’s vision of the “golden age of Apollo” has enormous appeal for many contemporary Americans who believe that the nation has lost its way in a postmodernist age. (Tom Crouch)

83) The film’s success can be attributed to its ability to tie into a familiar interpretation of experience shared by many Americans, an interpretation linked to our frontier origins. (Susan Opt)

84) Four decades later, it's easy to forget just how improbable that safe return was, following an oxygen tank explosion that forced the crew to take refuge in the lunar module. There's a reason that during training the astronauts never simulated that kind of emergency — because everyone knew that if an explosion wrecked your ship and all your power and oxygen vanished, you'd surely wind up dead. It's a little like taking a driving course and practicing what to do if your car hurtles off a cliff. What's the point? (Jeffrey Kluger)

85) Well, I'm afraid this is going to be the last lunar mission for a long time. (Jim Lovell, qtd. in Courtland)

86) [Gene] Kranz, a buzz-cut ex-fighter pilot who would crank himself up for a challenging day at work by playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" in his head, was the unchallenged field general in Mission Control, rarely questioned even by his superiors. During our first meeting I asked him how he — who knew the odds Apollo 13 was facing better than the crew themselves — dealt with the near statistical certainty that the men weren't coming home. His answer was that he didn't need to deal with it. "I couldn't say when the astronauts would get back or how much spacecraft we'd have left when they did," he said. "But I never questioned that they'd survive." To me, that never seemed like denial that a bad thing was going to happen, but an exertion of pure, clean will to ensure that it didn't. (Jeffrey Kluger)

87) Sufficient work has been done to identify and understand the nature of the malfunction and the direction which the corrective actions must take. All indications are that an electrically initiated fire in oxygen tank no. 2 in the service module (SM) was the cause of the accident. Accordingly, the Board has concentrated on this tank; on its design, manufacture, test, handling, checkout, use, failure mode, and eventual effects on the rest of the spacecraft. The accident is generally understood, and the most probable cause has been identified. However, at the time of this report, some details of the accident are not completely clear. (Apollo 13 Review Board)

88) The moment in the mission Jim much prefers to recall — and the only one about which I have ever seen him yield to unalloyed pride — was when he first tried to maneuver the intact lunar module (LEM), which was attached to the carcass of the command module and was now serving as a sort of lifeboat. The LEM was meant to be piloted only after the two spacecraft were separated, and the dramatic shift in center of gravity when the ships were linked made the control stick work in precisely the opposite way it was supposed to: try to yaw left and you go right; try to pitch up and you pitch down. Imagine driving down a highway at 5,000 miles per hour and all of a sudden your steering wheel switches its left-and-right capabilities. "I had to learn to fly all over again," Lovell says, in what passes for boasting when boasting is not something you do. (Jeffrey Kluger)

89) Lovell is the only person to have traveled to the moon twice without landing on it. He was to have done so in 1970 on Apollo 13, but an explosion crippled the craft, forcing the crew to squeeze into the lunar module, which they used as a lifeboat to return to Earth. (Hal Weitzman)

90) Four decades later, it's easy to forget just how improbable that safe return was, following an oxygen tank explosion that forced the crew to take refuge in the lunar module. . . . But Apollo 13's astronauts did survive. Part of that — a great deal of that — was due to the extraordinary technological and navigational improvisations the people on the ground and in the spacecraft dreamed up along the way. But the rest was due to the surreal cool of two men: commander Jim Lovell and flight director Gene Kranz. (Jeffrey Kluger)

91) And so the Apollo lunar program began. The 25 billion dollar investment was risky, but the potential payoff was huge. It could mean untold technological advancements. And even more important, it could mean victory in the world’s eyes, a triumph for American democracy and ingenuity over Soviet totalitarianism. (History.com)

92) “ ‘O.K., 13, this is Houston. It appears to us that we’re losing O2 flow through fuel cell here, so we want you to shut the reac valve on fuel cell three. You copy? …’Did I hear you right?’ Haise, the electrical specialist, asked Lousma. ‘You want me to go through the whole smash for fuel cell shut down?’ ‘That’s affirmative.’ Haise turned to Lovell and nodded sadly. ‘It’s official,’ said the astronaut who until just an hour ago was to have been the sixth man on the moon.’ ‘It’s over,’ said Lovell, who was to have been the fifth. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Swigert, who would have overseen the mother ship in lunar orbit while his colleagues walked." (Lovell and Kluger 126)

93) One of the more poignant moments in the Apollo 13 film, which was based on the book of the same name Jim and I wrote, occurs when lunar module pilot Fred Haise is suffering from fever and chills and Jim gives him a bear hug to share his body heat. It was deep in the midst of writing the book, during one of the many, many interview sessions we had, that Jim at last offered up that detail. "Now?" I wanted to ask. "It took you till now to recall that exquisite bit?" I did not say that, of course, because I actually wasn't surprised that he never made mention of it before. Test pilots don't hug, they fly things. And if necessary, they die in the process. (Jeffrey Kluger)

94) While the accident aboard Apollo 13 gave the US its first knife-edge space drama, Lovell says the highlight of his career was two years earlier, on Apollo 8. "We got to the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a poor year for this country. We had Vietnam. We had civil unrest. We had the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But we went around the moon and saw the far side for the first time. A script writer couldn't have done a better job of raising people's hope." (Jim Lovell, qtd. in Weitzman)

95) Bringing one of humanity’s greatest scientific endeavors eyeball to eyeball with one of its most enduring superstitions had an irresistible appeal, and most people applauded the hubris, the c’mon-I-dare-you arrogance, of flying the mission anyway, and even embroidering a big, loud ‘XIII’ on the patches of the suits the astronauts would be wearing throughout the flight (Lovell and Kluger)

96) “Fellows," Lovell said, "we’re home." (Lovell and Kluger 334)

97) The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy. You realise how insignificant we really all are. Everything you've ever known – all those arguments and wars -- is right behind your thumb. (Jim Lovell, qtd. in Weitzman)

98) By naming the Apollo 13 flight as one of humanity’s greatest adventures, the popular media created the expectation that this was a story worth retelling, and, by extension, made Apollo 13 a movie worth seeing. (Susan Opt)

99) Powering up a spacecraft without the temperature, pressure, power, and attitude readouts that would let you monitor the equipment was a bit like trying to paint a portrait in a dark room. No matter how good your artistic instincts, when the lights went on you’d almost certainly be disappointed by the results. (Lovell and Kluger 287)

100) His [Tom Hanks’] Lovell -- as strong, faithful and emotionally straightforward as Forrest Gump -- carries the story like a precious oxygen backpack. His resourcefulness gives Lovell strength, his gift for conveying worry gives the film its humanity and a purchase on ordinary-Joe heroism. (Richard Corliss)

101) "Freddo," Lovell said, turning to Haise, "I’m afraid this is going to be the last moon mission for a long time." With Aquarius’ microphones switched to vox, the commander’s forlorn observation drifted 200,000 miles, into the heart of Mission Control and, from there, out into the world. (Lovell and Kluger 205)

102) 055:52:58 CC
13, we've got one more item for you, when you get a chance. We'd like you to stir up your cryo tanks. In addition, I have shaft and trunnion - -
055:53:06 CMP
Okay.
055:53:07 CC
- - for looking at the Comet Bennett, if you need it.
055:53:12 CMP
Okay. Stand by.
055:55:19 LMP
Okay, Houston - -
055:55:20 CDR
I believe we've had a problem here.
055:55:28 CC
This is Houston. Say again, please.
055:55:35 CDR
Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT.
055:55:42 CC
Roger. MAIN B UNDERVOLT.
055:55:58 CC
Okay, stand by, 13. We're looking at it. (Apollo 13 communication)