Manned Space Programs Accident/Incident Summaries, 1970-1971 (NASA CR-120999)

Cranston Research of Alexandria, Virginia compiled this 139-page ledger of manned space program mishaps for NASA under contract NASW-2225. The years are 1970 and 1971, so Apollo 13 falls inside them. The NTRS record counts 223 mishaps, which works out to roughly one every three days across the two years.

The entries were assembled from company records as well as NASA's own. An earlier volume covered 1963 through 1969 and sorted its 508 mishaps into ten systems, among them cryogenic, electrical and propulsion. The contractor sat outside the agency, and the arrangement by system gathers failures by what broke instead of by which flight they happened on, which is how an engineer would want to read them.