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. This programme contains distressing details.Our guest is Bárbara Fernández Melleda, Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Hong Kong.We start with Ch ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Professor Barbara Keys, a specialist in US history at Durham University.We start with a celebration of the American Freedom Train, as the US prepares to mark 250 ye ...  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