Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” turns 30

Ron Howard's "Apollo 13" turns 30

June 30, 2025

This morning, Ars Technica published a great piece looking back at the film Apollo 13. It was first released to theatres 30 years ago today.

Apollo 13 is one of my favourite films, and it’s something I watch at least once a year. I can’t remember seeing ads for it ahead of its release. At the time I was generally interested in space-stuff, but I don’t think I would have rushed out to see this. I knew basically nothing about the Apollo program at the time. I grew up in the age of the shuttle, and anything that came before that was ancient history. This film changed that for me.

I first got to see Apollo 13 on a tiny screen wheeled out by my junior high school science teacher on the last day before Christmas break in 1995. I’m not even sure we were told what we’d be watching, but who cares, right? We were all happy to take the afternoon off and watch a film rather than pretend to learn. Once the show got underway, I was spellbound.

I couldn’t get enough of the jargon and how real things looked. In part, this was because a lot of filming was done aboard the “Vomit Comet”, a plane doing insane manoeuvres to generate near-zero gravity.

I was lucky enough to have dial-up internet access at the time. After racing home from school, I looked up everything I could about the Apollo flights and the Saturn V rocket. I remember specifically being fascinated by Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell saying “talkback is barber pole” as the LM is successfully captured (at 43:12 in the film). ¹ It’s just a wonderful piece of gobbledygook, and it took me a while to figure out what it meant.

The Apollo command and lunar modules had several ways of displaying status data to the crew. One way is with “talkback annunciators”, or just “talkbacks”, small shutter-based displays that are either fully closed (grey), half-closed (half-barber pole), or fully open (barber poles). Each state means something different for each display. You can see an example of these displays in this Space Exploration Stack Exchange question. It’s a small thing, but even in 1995 I was able to spend a good chunk of the Christmas break learning about old space missions on slow as hell dialup. Those memories are deeply tied to this film for me.

If any of this has convinced you to nerd out more on this topic, I highly recommend the Apollo Guidance Computer and Apollo Comms series by CuriousMarc on YouTube. Also the Haynes manuals for the Saturn V and the Apollo 11 mission.

What was actually said was “we’ve got two barber poles”, and it was said by Jack Swigert. However, that phrase was said in another context later in the flight after the accident. ↩