This view of the damaged Apollo 13 Service Module was photographed from the Command Module soon after separation. Photo: NASA/JSC

The crew have successfully jettisoned the Service Module, and taken photographs of it, heavily damaged, and with debris hanging from it.

Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, clearly very excited by the spectacle, were able to get a good view of the damage that nearly cost them their lives as they jettisoned the Service Module.

Lovell described how the big cylinder, still weighing around 20 tons, had had a whole panel blown out, from the base to the rocket engine. They could see much debris hanging down from the side as the Module moved slowly back from them.

"It's really a mess", said Haise, obviously shaken by the sight. Lovell, busily focussing his camera, cried: "Oh, I've got her; beautiful, beautiful."

An entire panel on the side of the Service Module appears as though it was blown away in the explosion. Photo: NASA/JSC

It was the second of three major hurdles successfully overcome in these last hours of their long fight back to earth and safety. Earlier, a 23-second burn of the Luar Module's small thruster engines had sideslipped the spacecraft right into the middle of the re-entry corridor. Then, with Jack Swigert in the Command Module, and Lovell and Haise in the Lunar Module, they worked delicately together, unlatching the crippled Service Module, and pushing it away at one foot per second.

This manoeuvre brought America' s Space Agency chiefs their best news since the disaster struck. The astronaut's descriptions, plus the pictures they've taken, should make it possible to reconstruct what went wrong. And without such information there cannot, of course, be any more manned Apollo flights.