As NASA's Mission Control tries to find a way to bring the crew home safely, Lovell, Haise and Swigert try to stay alive over 200,000 miles away. .
When Apollo 13 lifted off, it seemed that traveling to the moon and going for a stroll on its lunar surface was considered routine and boring to the public. But just after the live telecast that the networks dropped and no one saw, an explosion occurred on the Odyssey. Then came Lovell's heart-stopping words: "Houston, we have a problem." Mattingly was transformed into the man on the ground with the most knowledge of the cripple capsule (Summary). The Aquarius, the lunar module, became a life boat for the stranded astronauts. The crew dealt with electrical problems, rising CO2 levels, freezing temperatures and a possible heat shield malfunction. Suddenly, the routine and boring mission captivated the entire world for four days. Later, it was said that the Apollo 13 flight was a successful failure in that the crew returned safely but did not get to land on the moon. .
The six functions of the media are entertainment, reporting the news, identifying public problems, socializing new generations, providing a political forum and making profits (Schmidt 349-351). In the movie Apollo 13, providing a political forum, socializing new generations and making profits were not relative functions per se of the media. .
Identifying public problems as a function of the media was implied during the movie. In a sense, the intrusion of the media into the families of the astronauts stranded in space was a problem. However, the media tends not to degrade itself. Three days after the launch of Apollo 13, the major networks were going to broadcast live footage from the confines of the Odyssey and Aquarius. The astronaut's families watched the footage at NASA's Mission Control. When Marilyn Lovell (Kathleen Quinlan) asks Henry Hurt (Xander Berkley), who is in charge of media relations, if the networks were broadcasting the footage, he said the networks scrubbed them saying it was routine and boring.
