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 was unknown for nearly 40 years but it was rediscovered in 2010 in photographs by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and its retroreflector is now in use. Both the United States and the USSR had the capability to soft-land objects on the surface of the Moon for several years before that. The USSR successfully landed its first unmanned probe (Luna 9) on the Moon in February 1966, and the United States followed with Surveyor 1 in June 1966, but no unmanned landers carried retroreflectors before Lunokhod 1 in November 1970. Post-Apollo lunar exploration missions have located and imaged artifacts of