I was in tears.
I said, "Mother, is Dad really going to die?"
We met in high school.
He was a Junior and I was a Freshman,
he was two years ahead of me.
That was back in the early 40s.
You know, Nasa was family.
Everybody that lived around us was all family.
You see the smoke.
The crackling noise that comes
through seconds later
and the ground shakes,
then the heat wave.
That's amazing.
This is the crew of Apollo 13
wishing everybody there a nice evening...
OK Houston, we've had a problem here.
I had just arrived home and the phone rang.
It was a friend of ours, Jerry Hammack.
The first thing he said to me was,
"This country, that country, they all have
offered for the spacecraft to land".
And I said, "What are you talking about?"
And he said, "Well hasn't anyone told you?"
And I said, "What?"
We've had a hardware restart.
I don't know what it was.
Houston we've had a problem.
We've had a Main B bus undervolt.
And we had a pretty large bang
associated with the caution and warning there.
Hi, listen Ken, I'm naturally concerned.
How are things looking this morning?
I... my kids aren't up yet
and I was wondering what I could tell them.
I've been up all... I haven't been able to sleep,
it's been a nightmare...
Jim gone to bed yet at all, do you know?
No erm...
He's still up?
Fred's sacked out right now and
we're going to have a change in command here
in a little bit and
Jim and Jack are going to sack out
and Fred will mind the store for a while.
Oh, OK, well that makes me feel better
and he'll get some rest.
The very next day my mum sent me to school.
A boy came up to me out in the hall
and he said, "I am so sorry
that your father's going to die".
And I said, "Really?"
And he goes, "Yeah, it's all over the news".
So of course I was upset, I cried and
somebody came to pick me up that day.
Father Raish was sitting on the coffee table
and around the coffee table were all my
mother's friends and all these astronaut wives
and they were all praying.
It was at that point that I was like,
"Oh my gosh, he really is going to die".
So how do you feel about making a
16-foot-per-second burn in 37 minutes?
Well we'll give it a try, Jack
if that's all we've got...
I was very upset.
No one was paying attention to what was
going on until the accident occurred.
And immediately they pounced on us.
Even at a young age, you recognise that
there's something not right and you
start to realise you really want your dad back.
I was surrounded by my children.
In fact I remember holding Jeff, the little guy.
I held him so tight that he screamed.
We were waiting and we were waiting
and we were waiting and
I can remember how afraid I was
that something was wrong.
Everyone was screaming.
It was fantastic.
Probably the biggest relief
I've ever had in my life.
I think that he and I
thought of each other during all this time.
When we got back to our neighbourhood
with my dad,
when he finally got back to our hometown,
that point was probably when I was
the most relieved.
We were actually home
and Dad was there with us.
In everything,
you have to have a positive attitude.
I think when I look back on my life
I can leave it with a sense of...
achievement.