World Reacts To Apollo Plight

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32273, 16 April 1970, Page 17

World Reacts To Apollo Plight

rN.Z. Press Association—Copyright!

NEW YORK, April 15. Suddenly, in the moment it takes to stop a leakage of oxygen or register a weak electric power supply, the flight of Apollo 13 was no longer something everybody took for granted and, perhaps, was even slightly bored with. All over the world, during the Apollo 13 emergency, there was an upsurge of interest in the flight. And there were prayers, and anguish, too, for the three men who were fighting to bring their crippled spacecraft home.

The world-wide shift in interest is best summed up in two printed lines—one in an Italian newspaper, the other in a French journal.

Before the bad news broke, “11 Giorno” in Milan, commented in a headline: “Too Perfect —The Public is Getting Bored.”

In Paris, after the mission was aborted, “Le Monde” said: “The whole human race is participating with them in the agony of their return.”

In the United States there was an outpouring of prayer; and, here and there, some expression of bitterness, too, that man was reaching toward space without having first solved the problems on earth.

Both the Senate and the; House of Representatives; passed resolutions today ask-i ing all Americans to pray at!

9 o’clock tonight for the safe return of their countrymen: and they urged businesses and communications media to pause briefly, if they could, for the prayers at that hour. In the Vatican, Pope Paul offered prayers for the safe return of the three astronauts. As millions of people in America watched their television sets, waiting for an assurance that everything will be all right, many wondered | if. perhaps, this was a time ■to end—or, at least to delay —the Apollo programme Officials close to the space programme have always known the deadly dangers involved in pushing out into new frontiers of space, but for the ordinary man it all seemed too highly-organised, too technically brilliant, to fail.

The wonders of television ifrom space had palled, the jcrowds at Cape Kennedy for blast-offs had thinned, the ■ scene in the press room at Houston—one almost of bedlam for Apollo 11—was one approaching boredom as journalists waited for the third ■ moon touch-down, ' Then came the words from

the astronauts thousands of miles out of space: “Houston, we’ve got a problem here.” The calm understatement of the crisis conversations between the crippled spacecraft and ground control somehow served to heighten the drama for a nation not usually given to understatement For millions it ushered in hours of watching television or listening to the radio. In Europe, too, millions watched the drama unfurl. Pictures of the scenes at Houston were relayed live overnight across the Atlantic by satellite, and a British Broadcasting spokesman in London estimated that Eurovision’s audience was 300 million.