\u201cI know today when I came out many of you were expecting Tom Hanks, but you\u2019re going to have to settle for little old me,\u201d Lovell often said at his public appearances after the movie was released.<\/p>\n Astronaut Jim Lovell (right) addressing Tom Hanks at the premiere of Apollo 13: The IMAX Experience<\/em> at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in November 2002.<\/p>\n Credit: Selected with NASA\u2019s second group of astronauts in 1962, Lovell first launched aboard Gemini 7, the first mission to include a rendezvous with another crewed spacecraft (Gemini 6). Lifting off on a Titan II rocket on December 4, 1965, Lovell and the mission\u2019s commander, Frank Borman, had one goal: to spend two weeks in Earth orbit in preparation for the later Apollo missions to the moon.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very exciting to me,\u201d said Lovell in a 1999 NASA oral history interview. \u201cI mean, it was tedious work, you know, two weeks. We did have a break when [Wally] Schirra and [Tom] Stafford came up [on Gemini 6] and rendezvoused with us. And then they were up, I think, 24 hours and they went back down again. And we stayed up there for the full time. But it was quite rewarding.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n At 13 days, 18 hours, 35 minutes and one second, Gemini 7 was the longest space flight until a Russian Soyuz mission surpassed it in 1970. Lovell and Borman continued to hold the US record until the first crewed mission to Skylab, the nation\u2019s first space station, in 1973.<\/p>\n Lovell then commanded Gemini 12, the final flight of the program, which launched on November 11, 1966. Only four days long, the mission stood out for demonstrating all of the skills needed to send astronauts to the moon, including rendezvousing and docking with an Agena target and the first successful spacewalks conducted by crewmate Buzz Aldrin.<\/p>\n \u201cBuzz completed three spacewalks of about 5.5 hours and everything was fine,\u201d said Lovell. \u201c[We did] everything we were supposed to do, and [had] no problem at all. So, it was a major turning point in the ability to work outside a spacecraft.\u201d<\/p>\n Lovell made his first trip to the moon as a member of the first-ever crew to fly to another celestial body. Reunited with Borman and joined by William \u201cBill\u201d Anders, Lovell launched on Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968. The mission was also the first crewed flight of the Saturn V, the massive rocket designed to send astronauts from Earth to the moon.<\/p>\n \u201cYou had to pinch yourself,\u201d Lovell said of the journey out. \u201cHey, we\u2019re really going to the moon!\u201d I mean, \u201cYou know, this is it!\u201d<\/p>\n A still from a 16mm motion picture film shows Jim Lovell during the Apollo 8 mission, the first flight by humans to the moon.<\/p>\n Credit: Lovell and his Apollo 8 crewmates were the first to see the far side of the moon with their own eyes and the first to witness \u201cEarthrise\u201d\u2014the sight of our home planet rising above the lunar horizon\u2014their photographs of such were later credited with inspiring the environmental movement.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cWe were so curious, so excited about being at the moon that we were like three school kids looking into a candy store window, watching those ancient old craters go by from\u2014only 60 miles [97 kilometers] above the surface,\u201d said Lovell.<\/p>\n Splashing down on December 27, 1968, the Apollo 8 mission brought to a close a year that had otherwise been troubled with riots, assassinations, and an ongoing war. A telegram sent to the crew after they were home said, \u201cYou saved 1968.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was part of a thing that finally gave an uplift to the American people about doing something positive, which was really\u2014that\u2019s why I say Apollo 8 was really the high point of my space career,\u201d said Lovell.<\/p>\n Even before launching on Apollo 13 on April 11, 1970, Lovell had decided it was going to be his last. At 42, he was the first person to launch four times into space. Had the flight gone to plan, he would have become the fifth person to walk on the moon and the first to wear red commander stripes while do so.<\/p>\n Jim Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 mission, poses for a photo with his Saturn V rocket on the launch pad in April 1970.<\/p>\n Credit: Instead, there was a \u201cproblem.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know why I did this, but I looked out the right window, and that\u2019s when I saw that at a high rate of speed, gas was escaping from the spacecraft. You could see a little plume of it,\u201d said Lovell in an April 2000 interview with collectSPACE. \u201cI then glanced at the oxygen gauges and one read zero and another was in the process of going down.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat is when I really felt we were in a very dangerous situation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Lovell and his Apollo 13 crewmates Fred Haise and John \u201cJack\u201d Swigert splashed down safely on April 17, 1970. In total, Lovell logged 29 days, 19 hours and three minutes on his four spaceflights.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Lovell was the 22nd person to enter orbit, and the 28th to fly into space, according to the Association of Space Explorers\u2019 Registry of Space Travelers.<\/p>\n Born on March 25, 1928, in Cleveland, Ohio, Lovell achieved Eagle Scout as a member of the Boy Scouts and studied engineering as part of the US Navy\u2019s \u201cFlying Midshipman\u201d program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1946 to 1948. Four years later, he was commissioned as an ensign and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.<\/p>\n Lovell reported for flight training at Naval Air Station Pensacola in October 1952, and he was designated a naval aviator on February 1, 1954. He served at Moffett Field in Northern California and logged 107 deck landings during a deployment aboard the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La<\/em>.<\/p>\n In July 1958, Lovell graduated at the top of the class at the Naval Air Test Center (today, the US Naval Test Pilot School) at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He was one of 110 candidates to be considered for NASA\u2019s original Mercury 7 astronauts but was turned away due to a temporary medical concern. Instead, Lovell became the program manager for the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II supersonic jet.<\/p>\n In 1962, Lovell was serving as a flight instructor and safety engineering officer at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach when he was chosen for the second class of NASA astronauts, the \u201cNext Nine.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to his prime crew assignments, Lovell also served on the backup crews for the Gemini 4, Gemini 9, and Apollo 11 missions, the latter supporting Neil Armstrong as backup commander. He also served on a panel studying what could be done in case of an in-flight fire after a fire on the launch pad claimed the lives of the Apollo 1 crew in 1967.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n After the Apollo 13 mission, Lovell was named the deputy director of science and applications at NASA\u2019s Manned Spacecraft Center (today, Johnson Space Center) before retiring from both the space agency and Navy on March 1, 1973. Lovell became chief executive officer of Bay-Houston Towing Company in 1975 and then president of Fisk Telephone Systems in 1977.<\/p>\n On January 1, 1981, Lovell joined Centel Corporation as group vice president for business communications systems and, 10 years later, retired as executive vice president and a member of the company\u2019s board of directors.<\/p>\n For 11 years, from 1967 to 1978, Lovell served as a consultant and then chairman of the Physical Fitness Council (today, the President\u2019s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition). He was a member of the board for several organizations, including Federal Signal Corporation in Chicago from 1984 to 2003 and the Astronautics Corporation of America in Milwaukee from 1990 to 1999. He was also chairman of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation from 1997 to 2005.<\/p>\n From 1999 to 2006, Lovell helped run \u201cLovell\u2019s of Lake Forest,\u201d a restaurant that he and his family opened in Illinois. (The restaurant was then sold to Jay, Lovell\u2019s son, but ultimately closed in 2015.)<\/p>\n In 1994, Lovell worked with Jeffrey Kluger to publish Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13<\/em>, which was later retitled Apollo 13<\/em> after serving as the basis for the Ron Howard movie.<\/p>\n In addition to being played by Hanks and having a cameo in Apollo 13<\/em>, Lovell was also portrayed by Tim Daly in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon<\/em> and Pablo Schreiber in the 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic First Man<\/em>. Lovell also made a cameo appearance in the 1976 movie The Man Who Fell to Earth<\/em>.<\/p>\n Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 commander, shakes hands with President Richard Nixon after being presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at Hickham Air Force Base, Hawaii, in 1970.<\/p>\n Credit: For his service to the US space program, Lovell was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service and Exceptional Service medals; the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and Presidential Medal of Freedom. As a member of the Gemini 7, Gemini 12, and Apollo 8 crews, Lovell was bestowed the Harmon International Trophy three times and, with his Apollo 8 crewmates, the Robert J. Collier and Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial trophies and was named Time Magazine\u2019s Man of the Year for 1968.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Lovell was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1982, the US Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1993, and National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1998.<\/p>\n A crater on the far side of the moon was named for Lovell in 1970. In 2009, he was awarded a piece of the moon as part of NASA\u2019s Ambassador of Exploration Award, which Lovell placed on display at the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum in Lexington Park, Maryland.<\/p>\n A statue of Lovell with his two Apollo 13 crewmates stands inside the Saturn V building at Johnson Space Center\u2019s George W.S. Abbey Rocket Park in Houston.<\/p>\n In 2005, Lovell donated his personal collection of NASA memorabilia to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, where it is on display in the \u201cMission Moon\u201d exhibition.<\/p>\n With Lovell\u2019s death, only five out of the 24 people who flew to the moon during the Apollo program remain living (Buzz Aldrin, 95; Fred Haise, 91; David Scott, 93; Charlie Duke, 89; and Harrison Schmitt, 90).<\/p>\n Lovell is survived by his children, Barbara Harrison, James Lovell III, Susan Lovell, and Jeffrey Lovell; 11 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Lovell was preceded in death by his wife Marilyn Lovell and parents James Lovell, Sr, and Blanche Lovell (Masek).<\/p>\n \u201cWe are enormously proud of his amazing life and career accomplishments, highlighted by his legendary leadership in pioneering human space flight,\u201d said Lovell\u2019s family in a statement. \u201cBut, to all of us, he was dad, granddad and the leader of our family. Most importantly, he was our hero. We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible. He was truly one of a kind.\u201d<\/p>\n A memorial service and burial will be held at the Naval Academy in Annapolis on a date still to be announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" James Lovell, a member of humanity\u2019s first trip to the moon and commander of NASA\u2019s ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, has died at the age of 97. Lovell\u2019s death on Thursday was announced by the space agency. \u201cNASA sends its condolences to the family of Capt. Jim Lovell, whose life and work inspired millions of people across […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43841"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"two](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/news-080825c-lg-640x360.jpg\")
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\n collectSPACE.com<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nPracticing for the moon<\/h2>\n
First and fifth<\/h2>\n
![\"a](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/news-080825f-lg-640x439.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/news-080825d-lg-640x960.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nFrom the cockpit to the board<\/h2>\n
Appearances and awards<\/h2>\n
![\"a](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/news-080825g-lg-640x419.jpg\")
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\n NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nLovell\u2019s legacy<\/h2>\n