Fred Haise Fred Wallace Haise , Jr . ( ; born November 14 , 1933 ) is an American engineer and former NASA astronaut . He is one of only 24 humans to have flown to the Moon , as Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 13 . He was to have been the sixth human to land and walk on the Moon , but the mission had to be aborted due to a spacecraft failure . He went on to fly Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests before retiring from NASA in 1979 . Early life and education . Haise was born in Biloxi , Mississippi . He attended Biloxi High School and Perkinston Junior College ( now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College ) . He graduated with honors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1959 . He completed post - graduate courses at the USAF Aerospace Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964 and the Harvard Business School PMD Program in 1972 . He underwent naval aviator training from 1952 to 1954 and served as a United States Marine Corps fighter pilot at MCAS Cherry Point , North Carolina , from March 1954 to September 1956 . NASA career . In 1966 , Haise was one of 19 new astronauts selected for NASA Astronaut Group 5 . He had already been working with NASA for several years as a civilian research pilot . He was the first astronaut among his class to be assigned to a mission , serving as backup lunar module pilot for both Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 . Apollo 13 . Haise flew as the lunar module pilot on the aborted Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 . Due to the free return trajectory on this mission , Haise , and Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert , the other two astronauts on Apollo 13 , likely hold the record for the furthest distance from the Earth ever traveled by human beings . Haise was slated to become the sixth human to walk on the Moon during Apollo 13 behind Lovell , who was to be fifth . Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell eventually became the fifth and sixth , respectively , on Apollo 14 , which completed Apollo 13 ' s mission to the Fra Mauro formation . Haise remained in the astronaut rotation and served as the backup mission commander for Apollo 16 . Though there was no formal selection , Haise was prospectively slated to command Apollo 19 with William Pogue as command module pilot and Gerald Carr as lunar module pilot . However , the mission was canceled in late 1970 due to budget cuts . Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests . After completing his backup assignment on Apollo 16 , Haise moved over to the Space Shuttle program . In 1977 , he participated in the program ' s Approach and Landing Tests at Edwards Air Force Base . Along with C . Gordon Fullerton as pilot , Haise as commander piloted the Space Shuttle " Enterprise " in free flight to three successful landings after being released from the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft . These tests successfully verified the shuttle ' s flight characteristics , an important step toward the overall success of the program . Haise was originally slated to command the second Space Shuttle mission , which would have delivered a booster module that would have boosted the Skylab space station to a higher orbit , preserving it for future use . However , delays in the Shuttle program development as well as an unexpected increase in Skylab ' s orbital decay led to the mission being abandoned . Skylab was destroyed upon entering the Earth ' s atmosphere in July 1979 , while the Space Shuttle did not launch until April 1981 . In June 1979 , Haise left NASA to become a test pilot and executive with Grumman Aerospace Corporation , where he remained until retiring in 1996 . In media . Bill Paxton played the role of Haise in the film " Apollo 13 " in 1995 . Adam Baldwin also played Haise in the mini - series " From The Earth To The Moon " .