The third planned lunar landing mission, Apollo 13, lifts off. Astronauts Jim Lovell and Fred Haise are scheduled to walk in the Fra Mauro region of the moon. Command module pilot Ken Mattingly falls victim to a medical condition, leaving NASA to make a rare substitution, rotating the backup crew’s command module pilot, Jack Swigert, to the prime crew prior to launch.
This mission is dramatized in both the We Interrupt This Mission episode of HBO’s 1998 series From The Earth To The Moon, as well as the 1995 movie Apollo 13.
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast