Apollo 13

Apollo 13 is a 1995 American docudrama film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris and Kathleen Quinlan. The screenplay by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert dramatizes the aborted 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission and is an adaptation of the 1994 book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, by astronaut Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.

The film tells the story of astronauts Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise aboard the ill-fated Apollo 13 for the United States’ fifth crewed mission to the Moon, which was intended to be the third to land. En route, an on-board explosion deprives their spacecraft of much of its oxygen supply and electrical power, which forces NASA’s flight controllers to abandon the Moon landing and improvise scientific and mechanical solutions to get the three astronauts to Earth safely.

In order to shoot a realistic film about space travel, director Ron Howard first had to figure out how he was going to depict weightlessness. During a visit to NASA, he learned that real astronauts trained for a weightless environment in NASA's KC-135 weightless trainer – the “Vomit Comet” – a hollowed-out, windowless, padded Boeing 707 jet that climbs to 30,000 ft. and then arcs into a steep dive, creating a 23-second period of weightlessness. When the jet reaches the bottom of its dive and arcs back up, the zero-gravity environment instantly disappears, becoming a crushing two gravities. As it begins to climb, the passengers and crew hit the deck.

Kevin Bacon recalled, “Ron called me up and said, ‘We’re going up in this zero-g airplane. And it’s for research. You don’t have to go. Absolutely no pressure. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go. Tom’s going to go. Gary’s going to go. Bill’s going to go. I’m going to go.’ You know, everybody was going to go. So, of course, I’m not going to look I’m an idiot. I mean, there is a certain element of my personality that is slightly male.”

To experience the “Vomit Comet,” Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon and Gary Sinise joined director Ron Howard and producer Todd Hallowell at Ellington Air Force Base. For their first zero-gravity flight, the KC-135 flew out to a distant spot in the Gulf of Mexico – remote waters hundreds of miles from a populated area. That morning, NASA medics prescribed to each of the “actor-nauts” a potent drug cocktail of scopolamine and Dexedrine to relieve motion sickness. In the breast pockets of each man’s suit was what NASA technicians call the “airman’s corsage” – two plastic bags with sealable tops, just in case.