Corrected entry: When Jim Lovell rips off his biomedical sensors, he says "I am sick and tired of the entire Western world knowing how my kidneys are functioning." The biomedical sensors don't measure kidney function, only breathing and heartbeat.
Vader47000
12th Aug 2005
Apollo 13 (1995)
3rd Sep 2007
Apollo 13 (1995)
Corrected entry: When the astronauts are preparing to dock with the Lunar Module, one of the people in Mission Control says, "If Swigert can't dock this thing, we don't have a mission." In fact, all three crew members were trained to peform the LEM docking, and had Swigert run into any trouble, Lovell or Haise could easily have done the procedure instead. This is confirmed in the DVD commentary.
Correction: Presumably Swigert is the best trained since this is his primary task, it's a reasonable, if not necessarily correct, remark to assume that if he can't do it then nobody can.
Someone in mission control says it in a voiceover that seems like it was added for exposition to build tension for the audience related to the "Jack is new to the mission" subplot. The idea that someone in mission control would be unaware of the cross-training of the astronauts to handle each others' tasks in an emergency is a dubious claim at best. And Lovell had served as the CMP on Apollo 8 (which admittedly didn't have a LM to dock with, but he was certainly familiar with how to fly and dock the craft).
19th Aug 2007
Apollo 13 (1995)
Corrected entry: The scene showing the astronauts thrust towards the forward panels, and then violently back into their 'couches' is meant to show the massive thrust from the ascent and second stage engines. In fact, this sequence is inaccurate: The earlier Mercury and Gemini rockets did indeed create this massive 10 to 15-G load momentarily upon the astronauts, but the Saturn V did no such thing. The Saturn V never exceeded more than 2 Gs during any portion of lift off or ascent, and was in fact referred to as the "old man's rocket" by astronauts in reference to its relatively mild G-loads during flight.
Correction: This actually happened with the Apollo 13 mission. It wasn't supposed to, hence Swigert's sarcastic comment about "some little jolt", but a slight mistiming in the engine firing caused it.
I think the point of the entry is that Lovell tells them to expect the jolt, implying that it was a feature of a Saturn V launch and that Lovell would be aware of it since he had experienced a Saturn V launch before, with Apollo 8. The scene as written is meant, then, to demonstrate Lovell's experience in spaceflight, even though the jolt would have been a surprise to him too.
2nd Mar 2014
Apollo 13 (1995)
Corrected entry: In the scenes where all three astronauts are wearing their space suits, they all have a red collar on the helmet and red markings on suits. The LEM pilot (in this case Fred Haise) would have blue markings and a blue collar so that Houston (and others) could distinguish between the Commander and the LEM pilot when they were on the moon.
Correction: The colours of the suit collars are in fact, correct. The difference in colour on previous flights was not to tell them apart from Houston (impossible with the black and white camera on Apollo 11). It was so the ground crew could tell the difference between an A7L (original / blue colour) and an A7Lb (upgraded / red colour) suit. The vent ports in the helmet wouldn't line up if the two styles of suits were mixed, so they changed the colour of the components to avoid that problem. By Apollo 13 astronauts only used A7Lb suits with red collars.
In addition, it was Lovell's suit that has red stripes on it (seen in the moonwalk daydream sequence) to distinguish between it and Haise when they would be on the moon. Apollo 11 and 12 suits had no such markings, so distinguishing between the astronauts was difficult, leading to the addition of the red stripes on the commander's suit.
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Correction: Lovell is just expressing his anger, this is a character mistake, not a movie mistake.
tw_stuart
It's not even a character mistake. Lovell is simply using hyperbole to express his frustration over feeling micromanaged.
Vader47000