A couple of years ago I had male breast cancer and they performed a double mastectomy.  
Part of that included removing my nipples.
So there. 🙂
Enjoy them while you've got them.

The "officer" that Tom Hanks shakes hands with on the carrier deck at the end is actually Jim Lovell, the astronaut whom Hanks portrayed in this film.

I'm 72 & my memory of 50+ years ago is hit or miss. But that 4 minutes glued to the tv in silence is something I will never forget. The tension was indescribable.

My father was one of the engineers that designed the heatshield that protected them on reentry, and my family were huge NASA supporters. I remember this quite well, including my dad saying "The shield will hold...the shield will hold.....". He was right.  Seems like a lifetime ago. Well I guess it is.

Fun Fact - the Naval Commander who shakes Tom Hanks’ hand on the deck of the aircraft carrier at the end of the movie was a cameo by the real Jim Lovell.

A note to add about the cameo by the real Jim Lovell at the end: He was originally asked to portray an Admiral instead of a Captain, but he put his foot down and refused to wear the insignia of a rank he had not earned. RESPECT!

Jack Swigert was a really good astronaut.

"Houston, this is Odyssey. It's good to see you again." That scene of sheer joy, relief and triumph has brought me to immediate tears for 30 years and counting.

I'm 65 years old and remember this. It wasn't 4 minutes it was SIX! The elementary school brought televisions into every room they could and had two in the lunchroom, so we could see what was happening. These memories stay with you.

A quote from the movie, "Failure is not an option." Gene Krantz actually never said those words. But he loved it so much that he used it in his auto biography.

I love how well Ron Howard interspersed real, unedited, programming from news and entertainment to accurately depict the tenor of how quickly the public felt that space flight was somehow  routine and simple; the two shuttle disasters also proved that travel beyond our thin, protective atmosphere is never simple nor routine.

I was a teen age spaceflight junkie in 1970, and lived through the event. I've watched the movie many times. Every I hear Lovell's little boy ask, "Was it the door?" it breaks my heart.

I was in high school when this event actually took place . . . I remember it well. Not long after this film came out, I was lucky enough to meet Jim Lovell. H signed my copy of his book, "Lost Moon," that the film is based on. I asked him what he thought of the film, and he said, "Well, it's Hollywood. But they got a lot of it correct."

I remember that night clearly.  I lived close to Johnson Spacecraft Center and suddenly in the middle of the night there was shouting, slamming doors and tires screeching as engineers got the call to get their asses back to work. We often saw the astronauts mowing their grass or taking their families out for comidas.  We still had heroes then.

This is a very accurate depiction of what happened, but there are a few things it gets wrong:
1) There were no doubts about Swigert’s ability to fly the mission. In fact he was considered to be the expert on CM systems, and they were lucky to have him onboard when things went wrong.
2) The argument never happened.
3) It wasn’t just Mattingly in the simulator figuring out the power up sequence. NASA had full crews in all the simulators working on procedures. (And the power up procedure was radioed up to them about 12 hours before reentry, so it wasn’t such a last minute thing.)

The flight director says, “failure is not an option!”
While the REAL flight director Gene Krantz never actually said that, he liked the line from the movie so much that he used it as the title of his autobiography.

Marilyn Lovell lost her ring down the drain, but she did get it back. I would imagine the incident spooked her even more. I watched this mission live on TV. Good to hear that it still gets a mention in school.

Just to let you know, she got her ring back. 😂

It pretty much was a miracle.  None of these guys actually KNEW it would work, they just flew by the seats of their pants, pun intended!

Jack Swigert was as qualified if not more than Ken Mattingly, Swigert developed most of the emergency procedures for the command module so he knew the whole system inside and out as well as anybody on or off the planet. In some ways this movie which is incredibly accurate did him a disservice.