Houston, we’ve had a problem.

Forty years ago today, there was an explosion on board the Apollo 13 spacecraft. I had just turned eleven. As a kid, I was a major space program junkie. I knew who all the astronauts were, what flights had been taken (US and USSR), and the major achievements of each flight. In 1969, my folks bought me a kit for a four-foot-tall Saturn V rocket. Because of my dad's work, I had 8×10 glossies of seven original astronauts. Apollo 13 made a big impact on me.

A day or two after the explosion, my fifth-grade teacher had me bring my rocket to class so we could see how the rocket all fit together and better understand what the reporters were talking about. People largely forgot about the flight until Ron Howard made the Apollo 13 movie in 1995. The only thing that stuck was Lovell's iconic matter-of-fact utterance, "Houston, we've had a problem," frequently misquoted as "Houston, we have a problem."

Ron Howard also produced an excellent 2007 documentary called, In the Shadow of the Moon. The movie is unique in that no one speaks except for the astronauts who circled the moon or walked on it. The movie is filled with actual film footage. My favorite part is the last portion of the movie, where different astronauts talk about how the experience changed their lives. Almost all of them report having had some life-altering change in their appreciation for God or the idea that there was something bigger than they ever imagined behind their existence. A couple of quotes:

Jim Lovell: We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon, you can put your thumb up, and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you have ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself, all behind your thumb. And how insignificant we really all are. But then how fortunate we are to have this body, and to be able to enjoy living here amongst the beauty of the Earth itself.

Edgar D. Mitchell: The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn't 'Them and Us', it was 'That's me!', that's all of it, it's… it's one thing. And it was accompanied by an ecstacy, a sense of 'Oh my God, wow, yes', an insight, an epiphany.

One astronaut talks about how he became a Christian. Another talks about going to the mall a short time after his flight. He sat there eating ice cream and watching people, marveling at how amazing people are.

Anyway, hats off to the space pioneers.