How a Nazi rocket shaped America's path to the moon—and beyond

HUTCHINSON — Stare into the open hatch of Odyssey, the scarred Apollo 13 command module in which three American astronauts made their improbable return to Earth from a seemingly jinxed lunar mission, and ponder the fragility and strength of humanity.

Recently I did just that, and whispered thanks to the universe for bringing back another set of astronauts. I had not realized the depth of my anxiety over the Artemis II lunar flyby mission. When the crew safely splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10, my sense of relief surprised me. It was as if I’d carried the worry on my shoulders and the weight was lifted.

To explore this reaction, I embarked on a civic pilgrimage to Hutchinson.

It was my intent to commune with the bit of space history that I most closely identify with the Apollo era of lunar exploration. Some might consider Colombia, the Apollo 11 command module on display at the Smithsonian, to be the single most important NASA artifact. It was the capsule for the historic first moon landing, in 1969.

To me, Apollo 13 is more compelling.

It’s not just a story of exploration, but of survival.

Odyssey is on display at the Cosmosphere space museum, tilted at an angle as if re-entering the atmosphere, its pockmarked skin bearing witness to its journey. The hatch is open so you can see the cramped quarters inside, just enough room for all the needed gizmos and control panels and the three astronaut “couches” made of tubular steel and fireproof cloth.

The ship is in its own glass case at the Cosmosphere, so you can’t touch it, but you can get close enough that you can almost smell space, or at least imagine you can. The smell is ephemeral and variously described as oddly metallic or electrical, or like old gym socks, or oily meat.

If the Apollo 13 crew smelled anything, it was probably their own sweat.

Apollo 13 failed to land on the moon as intended because, on April 13, 1970, some 56 hours into the flight, a cryogenic oxygen tank on the service module exploded. The blast blew a hole in the side of the service module, leaving the Odyssey crippled, without adequate power or breathable oxygen. What was intended to be the third lunar landing became a rescue mission, as the crew temporarily abandoned Odyssey to shelter in Aquarius, the lunar module, while they sling-shotted around the moon. They returned to the Odyssey for splashdown.

That was 56 years ago.

Artemis II made essentially the same trip.

But the four-member crew didn’t just repeat history, they made it. They went farther into space than anyone before, at 252,756 miles, according to NASA, beating the previous record set by Apollo 13. It was also the first time for a woman or a Black astronaut to fly a lunar mission.

“As humans we have this dream to explore,” Éctor Díaz, the Cosmosphere’s director of marketing, told me as we stood in front of Odyssey. “So we are pushing ourselves to go back to the moon, so we can use it as a base for future explorations to Mars and beyond.”

Díaz said he believes we are in a new international space race, and that has created curiosity about the manned missions of the 1960s and 1970s. The Cosmosphere gets about 100,000 visitors a year, he said, with Odyssey probably the most asked-about display.

It was restored by SpaceWorks, a division of the Cosmosphere dedicated to preserving and replicating space artifacts. The capsule’s control panel and other items were fabricated by SpaceWorks, as the originals were missing. Because NASA considered Apollo 13 a failure, Díaz said, the capsule was neglected for years and even loaned to the French for a display at the Musee de l’Air in Paris. Attitudes began to change with the release, in 1994, of “Lost Moon,” a memoir by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell and science writer Jeffrey Kluger. The book became the basis for the movie “Apollo 13,” directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks.

Odyssey went on display at the Cosmosphere on the day the movie was released in 1995. The capsule is the property of the Smithsonian, the federal government’s group of museums and research centers headquartered in Washington, D.C., but it’s considered on permanent loan at Hutchinson. The Cosmosphere is an affiliate of the Smithsonian.

If you live in Kansas, you might take the Cosmosphere for granted. It’s been around in some form since 1962, when founder Patty Carey was motivated by the urgency of the space race to open a small planetarium in the poultry house at the Kansas State Fair Grounds. Carey had a lifelong interest in science, according to the museum, and had a knack for recruiting volunteers.

The planetarium moved to the Science Building of Hutchinson Community College in 1966. Ground was broken for a dedicated museum and educational space in 1979 and again in 1992. Both times, signals from Voyager I — NASA’s deep-space probe launched in 1977 — were used to ignite black powder charges signaling the expansions. For years, the space museum was known as the Kansas Cosmosphere, but the name has been shortened.

The museum’s collection of American space artifacts is surpassed only by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It also has the largest collection of Soviet-era space program artifacts outside Russia. Each of the thousands of pieces at the Cosmosphere was either flown, is “flight ready” authentic or is a historically accurate replica — and are so labeled.

Notable among the collection is the Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury spacecraft flown by Gus Grissom and retrieved off the Florida coast; the Gemini 10 space capsule, which orbited Earth in 1966; an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane; and a moon rock collected by Apollo 11. Each object on display has a story to tell about the space race, from the Hasselblad camera that was returned from the lunar surface to the ominous metal key that launched German V-2 rockets during World War II.

The exhibits don’t shy away from uncomfortable facts, and the V-2 rocket on display is an authentic Nazi “vengeance weapon” produced by enslaved laborers. The V-2 was the first man-made object to reach space, and former Nazi scientists, including Wernher von Braun, were instrumental to the success of the American program. Other displays address the tension between the capitalist and communist ideologies that drove the race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Jorge Montiel of Wichita and Deborah Medina of Garden City peer inside Odyssey, the Apollo 13 command module, on April 15, 2026, at the Cosmosphere space museum at Hutchinson. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

By the time Apollo 13 launched in 1970, the race was over.

With the success of Apollo 8, which did a lunar fly-by in 1968 and produced the iconic photograph “Earthrise,” and the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969, the Soviets gave up any plans for a manned lunar mission. Moon shots had become seemingly so routine that the launch of Apollo 13 didn’t lead the news, at least not until the explosion that scrubbed the mission and imperiled the crew.

In “Lost Moon,” Lovell described the moment as a “bang-whump-shudder” that shook the ship.

Lovell, who was in command, at first thought that lunar module pilot Fred Haise, a known prankster, was playing some kind of joke. But Haise said it wasn’t him. Jack Swigert, the command module pilot, had been in the tunnel between the Odyssey and Aquarius and saw the walls quake.

It soon became apparent from the instruments monitoring the tanks that the crew was in serious trouble, and they reported the problem to ground control at Houston. What they knew was that they would soon be critically low on oxygen and electrical power. What they didn’t know was that the explosion was ignited by a spark from an electrical short in one of the tanks, caused by wiring that had been damaged before the flight.

The tanks were cryogenic, meaning they stored pressurized liquid gas at extremely low temperatures. They supplied oxygen and hydrogen to the ship’s fuel cells to generate electricity and also provided metabolic oxygen for the crew to breathe. Before the explosion, there had been enough to last 14 days. After, they were forced to rely on the consumables in Aquarius, meant for two people for 45 hours. To get back to Earth, the supplies had to last three people for twice that.

The drama that unfolded included the use of the Aquarius as a lifeboat, the need to conserve heat and electrical energy, and the creation of a carbon dioxide scrubber from duct tape and other items on board. The jeopardy of the astronauts caught the attention of the world. For more than three days Americans held their collective breath, especially when the spacecraft was out of communication while rounding the dark side of the moon.

Such attention was in contrast to the Soviet space program, which operated in extreme secrecy. In 1971, three cosmonauts died in space aboard Soyuz 11, but the cause of their death — depressurization and asphyxiation because of a faulty valve — was not released for two years.

Despite competing political narratives that drove the race to the moon, NASA images showing the Earth as a fragile blue orb surrounded by the void of space inspired a sense of common humanity. What started as a program assembled literally from the remnants of Nazi rockets had become, with the moon landing, a transcendent and unifying moment.

The space race was born of the arms race, but what had been embraced by the public wasn’t the conquest of space or military domination of the Earth. What NASA gave us was optimism for the future, a recognition of the fragility of the planet and a celebration of human creativity. The choice to make rockets to the moon or to blow each other up is ours. You can’t see geopolitical boundaries from space. We chose peaceful exploration.

Apollo 13 — and in later decades the Challenger and Columbia disasters — reminded us of the inherent risks of space flight. But Apollo 13 demanded our attention in ways that immediate catastrophic failures couldn’t. The fate of three astronauts attempting to get back home struck a Homeric note in all of us, because even though few of us will go into space, all of us know what it’s like to long for home.

It also turned our gaze from the moon back toward Earth.

The Apollo 13 crew made it back safely, splashing down April 17, 1970.

The crew of Artemis II has now joined, with Lovell and Haise and Swigert, the ranks of those who have dared — and returned. Their 10-day trip around the moon was historic not only because they flew around the dark side of the moon, but that they carried forward a spark thought to have been extinguished half a century ago.

They are commander Reid Wiseman; pilot Victor Glover; mission specialist Christina Koch; and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian astronaut. Díaz, the Cosmosphere spokesman, said the crew has agreed to come to the Cosmosphere, but a date has not been set.

As I stood before the Odyssey at the Cosmosphere, I reflected on why I felt such a sense of relief when I knew these four individuals were safe. At first the news that we were returning to the moon seemed old hat, because we’d been through all that when I was a kid. Back then, I was space crazy, and one of the toys I’ve kept from my childhood is a 14-inch tall G.I. Joe Mercury capsule. The Joe inside even has a miniature Hasselblad strapped to his wrist. It’s on the shelf behind me as I write and was given to me by my paternal grandmother, despite my parents complaining that it was too expensive.

I had been apprehensive about the Artemis II flight because of the capsule’s imperfect heat shield, which one expert gave a 1-in-20 chance of failing. I had also been worried because a lot of details can get lost in 50 years, and it seemed like NASA was essentially starting from scratch, again.

But my reaction at splashdown was more than just relief.

It was something I hadn’t felt in a while.

I harbored a small sense of optimism for the future.

The Apollo program represented the best of what America can do, from a technological and aspirational standpoint. It was about collective effort, courage, creativity and resilience. While space flight will not solve every problem on Earth, it encourages the kind of thinking — and perhaps more importantly, the kind of spirit — that just might solve most of them.

On the day I visited the Cosmosphere, there seemed to be the typical group of visitors. Packs of school kids surged down the hallways, going from one educational activity to another. Older adults passed slowly through the exhibits in the museum, perhaps reflecting on where they were when Odyssey sailed the wine-dark sky.

As I watched, a young couple leaned close to the glass protecting the Apollo 13 capsule.

They were Deborah Medina of Garden City and Jorge Montiel of Wichita. Montiel said he had graduated from Wichita State University as a mechanical engineer and had just landed a job at Boeing. To prepare, he had come to the Cosmosphere to learn about aerospace history.

Peering through that hatch was the place to start.