Fridge / Apollo 13

Fridge Brilliance

• When Jim Lovell is describing how the mission will go to his young son, he says that he will land on the Moon "better than Neil Armstrong. Way better than Pete Conrad." This seems an odd thing to say: why would he consider Armstrong's landing to be better than Conrad's on Apollo 12? (Especially considering that Conrad made a pinpoint landing.) However, it makes more sense when you consider that Jim Lovell and Pete Conrad knew each other well from before they became astronauts: they worked at the same Navy test pilot school. Conrad used to call Lovell "Shaky", an embarassing name for a test pilot - so this is actually Lovell poking fun at his old Navy buddy in turn.
  • It's more likely a comment on Armstrong almost running out of fuel while steering to an alternate landing site. He did land directly on target—but it wasn't the original target; first, due to mass concentrations on the moon (that NASA had not yet learned to compensate for; they had it figured out by Apollo 12), Apollo 11 was going to land a couple of miles past the center of the landing ellipse. Then, on approach to the revised landing site, Armstrong found it strewn with boulders which weren't visible in the telescopic images used for mission planning. Landing at the planned site risked damage to the LEM's landing struts, which would strand Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon without enough air to survive until rescue; Armstrong preferred to chance finding a safe landing site before the LEM's descent engine ran out of fuel; without disparaging Conrad's work as the Apollo 12 LEM pilot, any fair observer must acknowledge that Armstrong's successful seat-of-the-pants landing was the greater accomplishment of the two.
  • There's a bit of Historical In-Joke involved here too; Conrad and Bean accidentally pointed the lens of their television camera into the sun as they were setting it up, which ruined any chance of video broadcasts from the moon for that mission. This was likely a factor in the networks not wanting to carry Apollo 13.
• Towards the end of the movie, Marilyn gets Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men on the moon, to accompany Blanche, Jim's elderly mother while watching TV. Both were directly linked to Lovell in his space career. Jim and Buzz flew together on Gemini XII, and Jim was Neil's backup for Apollo 11.
• When Jim Lovell tells his crewmates to "get ready for a little jolt" as the Saturn V goes through staging, he's speaking from experience. At the time, Lovell was the only astronaut on the crew that had previously flown the Saturn V, on Apollo 8.
• The whole suiting up sequence can fall under this; not only does it make a big deal about the astronauts suiting up into their space suits, but much ado is made about Gene Kranz "suiting up" into the traditional vest that his wife made for him.

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