What began as a mission to land on the moon became history’s most harrowing space rescue after a technical failure forced the crew of Apollo 13 into a 200,000-mile race for survival.

But Apollo 13 was never supposed to set a record. The crew were just trying to get home, and their only way back to Earth was the long way around the Moon.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Astronaut Jim Lovell, who died Thursday, was part of the three-man crew on the Apollo 13 NASA mission in 1970. Decades later, Lovell wrote a book about the near-disaster that inspired ...

The longtime Lake Forest resident and restaurant operator recorded a message before his death last year for the astronauts, cheering their achievement. During their lunar flyby, the Artemis II crew broke Lovell's Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth.