Apollo 13: The drama that gripped the world

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.Our guest is Michelle Meinhart, a reader in musicology and cultural history at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London. We start by hearing about a Mexican song that captivated lov ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.We start with the launch of Expedition Robinson in Sweden in 1997 and discuss how reality TV began around the world with our guest Misha Kavka, Professor of Cross-Media Culture a ...  Show more

In 1970, three American astronauts were heading to the moon when disaster struck. Astronaut Fred Haise describes what happened. Originally broadcast 14 April 2010. 

April 13th, 1970. 200,000 miles from Earth, three astronauts are approaching lunar orbit when they hear a noise. Deep in the spacecraft, a tiny wiring fault has caused an entire oxygen tank to explode. Now, it’s a race against time to save the lives of the crew of Apollo 13. It c ...  Show more

The three astronauts on the Skylab 4 space research mission in 1973 got behind schedule when one of them vomited before they'd even got onto the space station. They felt they were being micromanaged by ground control, and that their workload was unreasonable - and one day, all th ...  Show more

April 14, 1970. Apollo 13 is a quarter million miles from Earth, speeding towards the Moon, when a sudden explosion rocks the ship. Against all odds, the astronauts pull off one of the most remarkable survival missions in NASA history. On the 50th anniversary of this harrowing fl ...  Show more