13 Minutes to the Moon
BBC World Service

This in-depth guide to the history of American space exploration has been going on since May 2019. Now into its second series, and usually available on successive Wednesdays, it specialises in the inch-by-inch re-enactment, in which a procession of talking heads, some of them rescued from the vault, others interviewed in their retirement, dilate on the extraordinary range of problems facing anyone involved in putting men into space in the project’s Nixon-era heyday.

If most of these difficulties were narrowly technical, then as Lifeboat, the second series’ third tranche, swiftly demonstrated, there was also an underlying current of emotional strife. Here in April 1970, presenter Kevin Fong was busy reconstructing the aftermath of the explosion that prevented Apollo 13 from reaching its target. With the command module leaking oxygen at an alarming rate, and the three astronauts, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, effectively stranded 200,000 miles from home, even the normally low-key Nasa tech men were turning panicky.