Fourteen seconds were the critical countdown to get the Apollo 13 crew safely back to Earth
In a crisis, a few seconds can be the difference between life and death. This was definitely the case when the Apollo 13 crew, led by James Lovell, found themselves in a bind when an oxygen tank in their craft exploded two days after launch. They were forced to abandoned ship and its mission to the moon, and moved to the Lunar Module in order to get back home. Unfortunately, the craft was not designed to support so many people for a long time. To conserve energy, all power had to be shut down.
As the mission had veered off course by 60 to 80 nautical miles, it meant the module would re-enter Earth's atmosphere at the wrong angle and would bounce back into space with no chance of recovery. The craft's course had to be manually adjusted, and Nasa calculated that it would require a fuel burn of exactly 14 seconds—no more, no less—to do that. With the digital timers unavailable to the crew because of no power, they could only rely on Omega Speedmaster watch strapped on the wrists of the astronauts.
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