Houston, we have a problem

[Stephen Morgan]

Short and to the point, Apollo 13.

During the sixties I keenly followed the Gemini and Apollo space programs in America. During the moonshots we were allowed in school to watch the tv in the assembly hall as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon's surface. Just one year after that historic event Apollo 13 blasted off on April 11th 1970 we watched again as it headed towards the moon. Just a few days later on the 13th, an oxygen cylinder exploded putting the whole mission into peril, endangering the crew 200,000 miles from earth.
Over the next few days the plight of the astronauts gripped the world with saturation news coverage from NASA's mission Control as they battled to safely return the astronauts to Earth, which they did on April 17th.
The plight of the mission is well documented which, for a while, seemed touch and go, but happily all ended well. My memories of the event are not as clear as I'd like them to be, but somewhere I have all the newspapers and clippings to be able to look back on as a fascinating piece of contemporary ephemera.
Oddly, the early episodes of The Ambassadors of Death seemed to mirror the events of Apollo 13, as the Doctor heads into space towards the ambassador's spacecraft he seems stranded in the unknown, we wondered what he would encounter? would they be friendly? and would get back to Earth?

[Anthony Williams]

Obviously, this all happened quite a while before I was born. Yet, in speaking to people who were around at the time, they were all totally transfixed by the events that transpired over those few days. It says a lot that those events were made into an extremely successful film. And it says even more that for a Hollywood production, only very minor dramatic liberties were taken with events.

I can only imagine how captivating everything must've been at the time. Obviously, real people were involved, but look at it from my own perspective, I can only imagine what compelling television the whole scenario must've been.