An oxygen tank explodes 200,000 miles from home, and a Moon landing becomes a fight just to survive. Almost every fix on screen really happened.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word is shown in a situation that gives its meaning away — no need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995). Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.)
April 1970. Commander Jim Lovell is leading NASA's third mission to land on the Moon, alongside Jack Swigert — a late replacement after the original pilot was pulled off the crew for exposure to measles — and Fred Haise. Two days in, the flight is going so smoothly that the television networks have stopped bothering to broadcast it live; nobody, it seems, is interested in watching astronauts do their jobs well.
Then an oxygen tank in the service module explodes. Warning lights flood the cabin, power begins draining away, and Swigert radios back the words that will define the mission: "Houston, we have a problem." Within minutes, the Moon landing — the entire purpose of the flight — is abandoned. The only goal left is getting three men home alive.
On the ground, engineers and flight controllers scramble to understand a disaster nobody trained for, working from incomplete data as the spacecraft drifts further from Earth.
1. Who is on board, and why is Swigert flying instead of the original pilot?
2. What happens two days into the flight, and what is abandoned as a result?
1. Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise; Swigert replaced the original pilot late, after he was exposed to measles.
2. An oxygen tank explodes, power starts draining away, and the Moon landing itself is abandoned so the crew can focus entirely on survival.
With the command module dying, the crew crowd into the lunar module — built to keep two men alive for two days, now home to three men for four. To save what little power remains, Mission Control orders almost everything switched off: heating included. The temperature drops close to freezing; condensation beads on every surface, and the astronauts' breath hangs visibly in the air.
A second, quieter danger builds alongside the cold: carbon dioxide. The lunar module's air scrubbers were designed for two men, not three, and the gas begins climbing towards dangerous levels. The command module has spare canisters — but they're the wrong shape for the lunar module's sockets. Overnight, engineers on the ground build a working adapter out of a plastic bag, a sock, cardboard torn from a manual cover, and tape, then talk the crew through assembling an identical one in space.
It works. The readings fall back into the safe range, and the makeshift device — nicknamed for its boxy shape — becomes one of the mission's quiet triumphs.
1. Why does the lunar module suddenly become so overcrowded and cold?
2. What is the danger with carbon dioxide, and how is it solved?
1. It was built for two astronauts for two days but must now support three for four days, so nearly everything, including heating, is switched off to save power.
2. The lunar module's air scrubbers can't cope with three people, so carbon dioxide rises dangerously; engineers on the ground design a makeshift adapter from a bag, cardboard and tape so the command module's canisters will fit.
The crew swing around the far side of the Moon and fire the lunar module's engine to bend their path back towards Earth. But one huge task remains: the command module, dead and freezing for days, must be brought back to life for re-entry — using a startup procedure nobody has ever tried in this order. On the ground, astronaut Ken Mattingly, pulled from the mission himself over the same measles scare, spends hours in a simulator working out a sequence that won't drain the last of the batteries, then reads it up to the crew line by line.
Damp instrument panels raise fears of a short circuit. Then comes re-entry: the spacecraft must hit the atmosphere at exactly the right angle, and radio contact is expected to black out for a few tense minutes. This time, the silence stretches longer than predicted, and Mission Control waits without a word from space.
Finally, static breaks — the crew's voices return, parachutes bloom over the Pacific, and Apollo 13 splashes down safely. A mission that should have ended in tragedy ends, instead, in celebration.
1. Who helps devise the procedure to restart the frozen command module, and how?
2. What is the tense final moment before splashdown?
1. Ken Mattingly, the astronaut bumped from the mission over measles exposure, rehearses the startup in a ground simulator and radios the steps up to the crew.
2. A re-entry communications blackout that lasts longer than expected, leaving Mission Control in silence until the crew's voices finally return.
Every decision on this mission was made for a reason, and every decision produced a consequence. English has a set of structures built exactly for this: clauses of purpose (why someone acts) and clauses of result (what happens because of it).
Complete each sentence with the infinitive form the meaning needs. More than one connector can be correct — the reveal shows the options.
1. The crew shut down almost every system on board (save) their last reserves of power.
2. Ground engineers spent the whole night testing the new checklist (make sure) it would really work before reading it up to the crew.
3. The astronauts moved carefully around the cabin (not / waste) any of their dwindling oxygen supply.
1. to save / in order to save / so as to save
2. to make sure / in order to make sure / so as to make sure
3. so as not to waste (the negative form of "so as to")
Complete each sentence with so that already in place — you just need the correct modal + verb.
1. Mission Control powered down the guidance computer so that the batteries (last) until splashdown.
2. Engineers built a makeshift adapter from tape and cardboard so that the carbon dioxide level (not / rise) any further.
3. The crew moved into the lunar module so that the freezing command module (stay) untouched and ready for the final hours.
1. would last
2. would not rise
3. would stay
Complete each sentence with so or such (a).
1. The cold in the cabin became intense that the astronauts could see frost forming on the walls.
2. It was serious problem that engineers worked without sleep for two days straight.
3. Power grew scarce that every non-essential system had to be switched off at once.
1. so (so + adjective + that)
2. such a (such + a + adjective + noun + that)
3. so (so + adjective + that)
Carry both into the Speak tab — this whole mission is a chain of purpose and result: every choice made in order to survive produced a consequence so serious it changed the next choice again.
Apollo 13 is unusual among space films: the crisis, the improvised fixes and the safe return all really happened. NASA itself later called the mission a "successful failure" — the landing failed completely, but the rescue succeeded completely too.
Apollo 13 launched on 11 April 1970, NASA's third planned Moon landing. Two days later, on 13 April, an oxygen tank in the service module ruptured, crippling power and life support for the command module Odyssey. The crew moved into the lunar module Aquarius and used it as a lifeboat, exactly as shown on screen — improvising a carbon-dioxide scrubber from a plastic bag, a sock, cardboard and tape when the command module's canisters turned out to be the wrong shape for the lunar module's sockets. Engineers also used the lunar module's engine to place the ship on a free-return trajectory, letting lunar gravity swing it back towards Earth without a risky separate burn. The crew — Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert (a late replacement for Ken Mattingly, who was pulled from the flight after exposure to measles) and Fred Haise — splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean on 17 April 1970.
The film's most famous line, "Houston, we have a problem," is a rewrite. What astronaut Jack Swigert actually radioed down was: "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here" — past tense, describing something that had already happened — and commander Jim Lovell repeated a near-identical version moments later. Screenwriters tightened it into the punchier present tense for the film, and that version is now the one almost everyone quotes, even though it was never actually spoken during the mission.
The film's other iconic line, spoken by the character based on flight director Gene Kranz, was never said during the real mission either. Screenwriters invented it to capture the spirit of Mission Control's determination. Kranz himself liked the phrase so much that he later used it as the title of his own memoir, published in 2000. What he actually told his team, by his own account, was closer to a personal promise: that he had never lost an American in space, and he wasn't about to start now — this crew was coming home, and everyone had to believe it.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of Apollo 13 in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: a routine flight and an unexpected explosion → the lunar module lifeboat, the cold and the carbon dioxide → the makeshift fix built overnight → powering up the frozen ship → the silent re-entry → splashdown.
Work in at least five key words (ingenuity, improvise, precarious, meticulous, catastrophic, negligible, ration, plummet, trajectory, contingency), and use purpose and result clauses when you explain the crew's decisions: "they powered down the ship in order to save energy"; "the cold was so severe that they could barely sleep."
The moment the oxygen tank explodes, the crew and Mission Control must abandon the mission's entire original purpose — landing on the Moon — to focus completely on survival. Build an argument: when a goal becomes too dangerous to continue, is it always right to abandon it completely and switch to damage control, or is it sometimes better to try to salvage part of the original plan? Bring in other examples you know — from work, from sport, from history.
Apollo 13 nearly ended in disaster on a mission that was, by 1970, considered so routine that television stopped covering it live. Is space exploration still worth the risk and the cost today, or should the money and effort go elsewhere? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: