Houston, We've Got a Problem is a 1974 television film about the Apollo 13

Apollo 13

Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST. The landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the service module upon which the Command...

 spaceflight, directed by Lawrence Doheny and starring Ed Nelson

Ed Nelson

Edwin Stafford Nelson is an American actor.Nelson has appeared in numerous television shows, more than fifty motion pictures, and hundreds of stage productions. Until 2005, he was teaching acting and screenwriting in his native New Orleans at two local universities there...

 in the role of NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz

Gene Kranz

Kranz's book, titled Failure Is Not an Option, published five years after the movie, stated, "...a creed that we all lived by: "Failure is not an option."" . The book has three index references for the phrase, but none of those give any indication of the phrase being apocryphal...

.

The film did not focus on the spaceflight itself, mostly a news-announcer type voice-over of archival news footage. Instead, it dramatised fictional personal crises among flight controller

Flight controller

Flight controllers are personnel who aid in the operations of a space flight, working in Mission Control Centers such as NASA's Mission Control Center, or ESA's Operations Center. Flight controllers sit at computer consoles and use telemetry to monitor in real time various technical aspects of a...

s at Mission Control in Houston.

On seeing the film, Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell

Jim Lovell

James "Jim" Arthur Lovell, Jr., is a former NASA astronaut and a retired captain in the United States Navy, most famous as the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which suffered a critical failure en route to the Moon but was brought back safely to Earth by the efforts of the crew and mission...

 wrote a letter to TV Guide

TV Guide

TV Guide is a weekly American magazine with listings of TV shows.In addition to TV listings, the publication features television-related news, celebrity interviews, gossip and film reviews and crossword puzzles...

magazine in which he commented that given all the medical and relationship crises depicted, it was safer aboard the stricken spaceship than it was at Mission Control.

The title of the film is a mistake, being a widely misquoted announcement made by Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert

Jack Swigert

He later became staff director of the Committee on Science and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives.Swigert was elected as a Republican to Colorado's newly created 6th congressional district in November 1982. He defeated Democrat Steve Hogan, 98,909 votes to 56,518...

 following the explosion of an oxygen tank which tore off the side of the spacecraft service module

Apollo Command/Service Module

The Command/Service Module was one of two spacecraft, along with the Lunar Module, used for the United States Apollo program which landed astronauts on the Moon. It was built for NASA by North American Aviation...

. Swigert actually said, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."