Alan Shepard explosion caused the moon landing to be aborted and nearly resulted in the loss of the crew. It became a joke between Shepard and Lovell, who would offer to give Shepard back the mission each time they bumped into each other. The failure of Apollo 13 delayed Apollo 14 until 1971 so that modifications could be made to the spacecraft. The target of the Apollo 14 mission was switched to the Fra Mauro formation, the intended destination of Apollo 13. Shepard made his second space flight as Commander of Apollo 14 from January 31 to February 9, 1971. It was
Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings party observers could expect to see the various craft at specific times according to scheduled launch times and planned trajectories. The Soviet Union monitored the missions at their Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment." Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered," describes how the Soviet Moon programme dwindled after the Apollo landing. The missions were tracked by radar from several countries on the way to the Moon and back. A group at Kettering Grammar School, using simple radio equipment, monitored Soviet and U.S. spacecraft and calculated