Construct an Apollo 13 Personal Launch System Rescue Spacecraft with sheet of notebook paper using printed template and instructions found by clicking here.

Return to SPACEACTS.COM Homepage

Read How the Apollo 13 Crew Made a Square Peg Fit into a Round Hole and do the same.

Read about Apollo 13's Engine Challenge. Construct your own Apollo 13 engine test as an educational activity for adults and children.

There is a popular Mark Twain book called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The fictional story’s appeal is a “time machine” type journey back to the days of Yore. A 20th Century citizen of the United States is planted in the society of 500 A.D. England. The gimmick making the book enjoyable is how the American Yankee used his modern knowledge to advantage in King Arthur’s day. What is now common technical and scientific knowledge appears mystical, magical, and supernatural to the knights of the legendary Round Table. The following activity is sort of an opposite approach. What if the Wright Brothers were transported 7 decades in time and thousands of miles above to that April week in 1970 aboard the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft? How might they use knowledge of their time to advantage? In lieu of Apollo 13’s powered down computer and star sightings obscured by debris, how could they establish the location of their spacecraft? The challenge would be to use simple arithmetic and a process much like Columbus’s dead reckoning navigation. The exercises and discussions which follow deal with their dilemma.

Read About the First Soviet Man(ikin) in Space (March 1961)