Fifty years ago, on July 15, 1975, three NASA astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts lifted off to meet up in orbit for the first time.

Representing the joint Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP, or Soyuz-Apollo in the Soviet Union), both crews wore a cloth patch that featured the artwork of an accomplished space artist. The design that flew, however, was not the astronauts' first pick. That patch idea was rejected because Paul Calle opted to highlight the détente nature of the international handshake in space.

"Our first choice for a patch... has been disapproved," wrote Deke Slayton, the mission's docking module pilot, in a letter to Calle. "It seems the powers that be are not that into peace doves and olive branches at the moment."

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A political effort to remove space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian and place it on display in Texas encountered some pushback on Thursday, as a US senator questioned the expense of carrying out what he described as a theft.

"This is not a transfer. It's a heist," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during a budget markup hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee. "A heist by Texas because they lost a competition 12 years ago."

In April, Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both representing Texas, introduced the "Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act" that called for Discovery to be relocated from the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia and displayed at Space Center Houston. They then inserted a provision into the Senate version of the "One Big Beautiful Bill," which, to comply with Senate rules, was more vaguely worded but was meant to achieve the same goal.

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This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring.

(Spoilers below.)

Apollo 13 is a fictional retelling of the aborted 1970 lunar mission that became a "successful failure" for NASA because all three astronauts made it back to Earth alive against some pretty steep odds. The film opens with astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) hosting a watch party in July 1969 for Neil Armstrong's historic first walk on the Moon. He is slated to command the Apollo 14 mission, and is ecstatic when he and his crew—Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton)—are bumped to Apollo 13 instead. His wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) is more superstitious and hence less thrilled: "It had to be 13." To which her pragmatic husband replies, "It comes after 12."

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