As soon as Apollo 13 left low Earth orbit, it was more or less on a free-return trajectory. All Apollo flights used this in case of a failure. It was a redundancy feature and well known by anyone working with the Apollo program. Hell, it was probably described by the news anchors on TV.
And it really isn't much of a slingshot. More like a little gravity perturbation. A real slingshot is like that of Jupiter's gravity slinging New Horizons to Pluto.
Stories like these are just misinformation and actually takes away from the facts.
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As soon as Apollo 13 left low Earth orbit, it was more or less on a free-return trajectory. All Apollo flights used this in case of a failure. It was a redundancy feature and well known by anyone working with the Apollo program. Hell, it was probably described by the news anchors on TV. And it really isn't much of a slingshot. More like a little gravity perturbation. A real slingshot is like that of Jupiter's gravity slinging New Horizons to Pluto. Stories like these are just misinformation and actually takes away from the facts.