The day ‘a bomb exploded … 200,000 miles from Earth’: Apollo 13’s successful failed mission Updated Apr 11, 2021; Lovell told NASA’s Mission Control, “There is one whole side of that spacecraft missing.” Apollo 13 with three astronauts on board lifted off for the moon from Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970. Two days later it became obvious that Apollo 13 would not be landing on the moon but instead fighting just to return to Earth. “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” said commander James A. Lovell Jr. That problem was an exploded oxygen tank. On April 14, 1970, the Associated Press reported, “ Never once, in the greatest crisis of their lives, in a danger that had materialized only in fiction, did the Apollo 13 astronauts lose their cool.