Bit of Hollywood Goes a Long Way for NASA : Movies: The box-office success of ‘Apollo 13’ renews interest in both that flight and the space program.

At a time when tourists are lured to the Johnson Space Center by a visitors pavilion designed by the Walt Disney Co., it’s not surprising that it took Hollywood to create public interest in a failed moon mission most had forgotten.

Apollo 13 was the third mission to the moon, an almost routine voyage that turned into a nightmare when an oxygen tank exploded in mid-flight, crippling the craft and seriously jeopardizing the chances of safely bringing its three-man crew back to Earth.

The harrowing film version of the four-day rescue mission during April, 1970, is a box-office hit for director Ron Howard, and long-delayed recognition for the astronauts whose courageous adventure had become a footnote in the story of America’s manned space program.

“NASA wanted to forget about this flight. It was a failure,” said Apollo 13 Cmdr. Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks. Following the rescue of the crew, said Lovell, there was a parade in Chicago and a meeting with then-President Richard Nixon, but “after the initial euphoria, it died down pretty quickly.”

Even in Houston, self-proclaimed Space City, interest was diverted within days of the rescue to the sensational murder investigation of a Texas socialite. The Apollo 13 command module--whose heat shield protected the crew from incineration during a fiery re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere--was exiled to a museum near Paris.

None of the Apollo 13 astronauts flew in space again. Lovell retired from the Navy in 1973 and worked as a telephone company executive in Chicago before retiring in 1992 to write a book about his Apollo 13 experience titled “Lost Moon.”

Apollo 13’s command module pilot, Jack Swigert--who before the mission was endlessly portrayed as the swinging bachelor with a fur-covered easy chair and beer spigot in the kitchen--went on to become a congressman from Colorado. He died of cancer in 1982.

Lunar module pilot Fred Haise, now 61, resigned from NASA in 1979 and now works in Florida as an executive with Northrop Grumman, a NASA contractor.

Each year, the Apollo 13 crew privately commemorated the anniversary of their ill-fated mission with a phone call--on April 13, the day Lovell and Haise were scheduled to walk on the moon. “Do you remember what day this is?” they would ask each other.

Now that their ordeal is big-screen entertainment, the astronauts are caught up in a publicity blitz that failed to fully materialize decades ago. Repeatedly asked to compare the movie with the actual mission, they laud the film for its technical accuracy, but downplay the emotional tension between crew members in the movie.

“The technical parts are very good--the mock-ups they built, the special effects they did, Mission Control as far as I could tell looked like the real McCoy,” said Haise. “But the crew conflict you saw in the movie wasn’t there. I suppose they put it in there to spice it up.”

Lovell said that while the events of the mission are history, the telling of the tale of Apollo 13 lies in the details. “It was deja vu watching the movie. It’s as authentic as possible without making it a documentary.”

For instance, the cabin really was so cold that the food froze.

And “all those little gestures that Hanks was doing,” Lovell said. “He put his thumb up to the moon. I’ve done that, I’ve also put my thumb up to the Earth. When you can hide the whole Earth with your thumb, you have to think about it for a while, your job, your life.”

Lovell’s wife, Marilyn, did not have a premonitory nightmare about the mission, as in the movie, but she did drop her engagement ring down a shower drain pipe. “She took this as a bad omen,” Lovell said. “She felt uneasy about the flight. She didn’t like the number 13.” Although the movie doesn’t show it, Marilyn Lovell later recovered her ring.

Haise, who reviewed all of the mission’s air-to-ground transmission tapes, said: “We never said a curse word the whole flight. But the movie ended up with a PG rating.” He said that the Apollo 13 crew did “push the ground to get us [a re-entry] plan. That was probably the only tension we had. We had never done it, or simulated it in practice, and we wanted enough time to do a dry run and get familiar with it.”

About a day and a half into the mission, Haise developed a urinary tract infection that caused chills and a fever of up to 104 degrees. Haise says the infection wore him down, but his misery was exaggerated in the movie. “I was ill but not incapacitated,” he said.

Gene Kranz, the crew-cut flight controller played by Ed Harris, is now retired and still lives near the Johnson Space Center, southeast of Houston. Sounding every bit the no-nonsense, straight-arrow technocrat who helped guide his colleagues back to safety, Kranz nevertheless admitted he “got misty-eyed when Ed Harris sat down and basically broke into tears, then sucked it up, stood up and faced the issues.”

No one thinks the movie will bring back NASA’s glory days, but there is hope that by revisiting the past, people will reconsider the future of space travel. Since “Apollo 13” opened, record crowds are visiting Space Center Houston, the Disney-designed tourist pavilion at the Johnson Space Center touted as “the magical place to discover space.”

Interest in the luckless mission is such that the Apollo 13 command module Odyssey, on loan since 1982 to the Musee de L’air at Le Bourget Airport outside of Paris, will be returned to the United States.

All of which is gratifying, if somewhat mystifying, to the imperturbable astronauts assigned to the 13th Apollo mission. “It just goes to show you the power of movieland,” Haise said. “There was nothing magical or superstitious about the number 13, that number had no relevance. Real facts caused the problem. It was an accident traced to hardware.”

Lovell calls their misfortunes “a bunch of coincidences that all occurred. But everyone came together and triumphed in the face of catastrophe. It was a successful failure.”