WASHINGTON - It is spring, 1970. On the eastern coast of Florida, on a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, the sixth Saturn 5 rocket to carry humans stood waiting to launch the third trio of Americans to the lunar surface. The voyage of Apollo 13 was center stage for the hundreds of thousands of Americans working on the U.S. space program, then just a dozen years old.

Yet for most of the rest of America and much of the world, the third trip to the moon barely merited their interest. That is, until disaster struck. Then, for much of the period between April 13 to April 17, 1970, the Apollo 13 crew's determined struggle to survive and get back home was at the top of the country's agenda.

And that outcome was by no means certain.

In fact, the fate of the remaining lunar missions had already been set by the time Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert were made ready for their launch towards the Fra Mauro highlands. During the planning stages of Apollo 11 -- America's first lunar landing -- enhanced capabilities of the mammoth Saturn 5 booster and extended stay-times for the lunar module allowed for an ambitious plan to exploit the project's capabilities.

The front page of newspapers across the country were devoted to coverage of the unfolding Apollo drama.

Here's what was planned at the time for the missions to follow Apollo 13:

• Apollo 14 would journey to the rugged lunar highlands and the crater Censorinus.
• Apollo 16 was aimed at the rim of the huge crater Tycho. With their lunar rover nearby, the crew was to descend the crater wall using a rope and pulley system attached to the rover.
• Apollo 17 was planned initially as a visit to the volcanic domes in the moon's Marius Hills. The astronauts were to take with them lunar drilling and mining equipment.
• Apollo 18 was to be dispatched to investigate the mysterious transient red flares sighted from Earth. Dropping down into Schroter's Valley, the crew was to set up equipment to detect any volcanoes still active on the moon.
• Apollo 19 was aimed at the moon's dead center. The astronauts were to explore the collapsed lava tubes near Hyginus Rille. Some early plans called for the astronauts to cut into the lunar walls and descend to the bottom of the rille.

But the boldest Apollo mission planned was the final voyage, Apollo 20. Carrying an extended stay-time lunar module (LM), Apollo 20 was to descend to the floor of the giant crater Copernicus to obtain samples from deep inside the moon.

These were bold missions. The Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences projected that 40 percent of the lunar surface explorations and nearly half of the traverses would be contained in the final two flights of Apollo.

But in the budget cuts of 1969 and 1970, they were canceled, as NASA fought to stay alive and begin development of the space shuttle. The remaining Apollo flights were redirected to other targets, and much of the advanced equipment and experiments canceled.

Not only was there little support for continuing lunar missions, but a just-completed plan for future space goals -- including lunar bases and Mars missions -- had fallen on deaf ears at the White House.

"There was a group chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew which had been chartered to provide recommendations for the future of the space program," said Professor John Logsdon, head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Logsdon said the group's report, submitted to President Richard Nixon in September 1969, "was dead on arrival -- the word that came back was 'no way are we interested in doing this'", Logsdon explained.

"But this was information NASA didn't want to hear", he added. NASA leadership tried anyway to interest the new Nixon administration in advanced human spaceflight missions. "It was a rear-guard action," Logsdon said.

What emerged instead, by the time Apollo 13 was being prepared for launch, was what the Nixon White House called "a balanced plan." No new initiatives, and most significant of all, no new money. "In general, it was a vapid endorsement of the future," said Logsdon.

But there were still remaining missions to fly -- in fact, five lunar voyages.

At the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, the space agency prepared to launch Apollo 13 and face the hordes of reporters and editors clamoring for a different angle on moon landings than the previous Apollo 11 and 12 missions.

"It was 'been there, done that' -- give us something new, something different, and above all it was more, more, more," said Julian Scheer, who led the NASA public-affairs team at the time of Apollo 13.

"There was an enormous press contingent that was screaming for something different," Scheer remembers. What he decided to do was to create a glass-partitioned area in Mission Control where two reporters could actually follow the mission 24-hours-a-day if they chose. "I told them that they would see and hear everything that we said and did," Scheer said.

He had to sell that to both the press pool and NASA management.

"The reporters who were present in Houston were the kind of hard-core space reporters," recalled Vic McElhenny, who was a science reporter for the Boston Globe during the Apollo era. As fate would have it, McElhenny would be in the NASA Apollo pressroom on the night of the accident. "I wasn't alone, but there weren't very many people up there," he remembered.

That is, until the disaster struck. "After a while the newsroom began frantically filling up with reporters who had been yanked from their nice dinners," he said.

Scheer was ready for the media onslaught that followed. He and his second in command, Brian Duff, had rehearsed what they would say, and who would say it in the event of a disaster during the mission.

"We planned for things going wrong on the way to the moon, or on the moon. So when the accident occurred, we had plans to use to guide us through the next several days."

Scheer said that key to his handling of the Apollo 13 mission was a decision by NASA leaders to keep the lines of communication open. "We had to say what was happening and not cut off access to the press," Scheer said.

And did that worldwide interest in the flight help NASA in its battles for future funding? "It wasn't support for new programs, it was support for saving that crew," Logsdon said. "All that crisis did to knowledgeable people was underline the fragility of the Apollo enterprise."

And, in a sense, Logsdon says, NASA was happy to end the Apollo series as it did. "They were worried about losing a crew. And there was no political capital that came out of Apollo 13," he adds.

But it made for an incredible story for those who covered it. "It's one of the most dramatic stories in the history of journalism, and it really got the public's attention," McElhenny remembers. "In some sense it got NASA back on the front page," he said.

If just for a brief, shining moment in time.