No spoiler warnings were required. When moviegoers first sat down to watch "Apollo 13" in the summer of 1995, they already knew how the story would play out. Those old enough could remember how, in April 1970, the world had been captivated when an explosion ripped through Apollo 13's command module, the Odyssey. In an instant, NASA's third attempt to land human beings on the Moon was transformed into a tense battle for survival, a mission with a single goal: bringing astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert home alive.
Understandably, Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon were granted top billing for playing the three stranded men in Ron Howard's Oscar-winning retelling of the story. But the movie is as much a celebration of the scientists who brought them home as the astronauts who kept their cool while they were trapped in the vast void between the Earth and the Moon. It's an ode to people who — when the chips are down — can literally find a way to fit a square peg into a round hole.
