The questions should be: If the Apollo 13 accident had happened instead during Apollo 8 while the astronauts were behind the moon, so that the mission was lost and the cause was not known, would Apollo 9, 10, and 11 been delayed past the end of the decade? Should they have been? What if the cause was known? Was the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union correct when it denied Soviet Cosmonauts the opportunity to beat Apollo 8 to the moon using a rocket that had dismally failed all its tests?

Fortune favors the bold, sometimes. Did the good luck of the preceding astronauts lead to the decision to launch a space shuttle under adverse conditions on the day Reagan was scheduled to deliver his SOTU, etc?