He never accomplished his career goal of setting foot on the moon, but one could argue he achieved a more significant feat. Jim Lovell, America’s oldest living astronaut, died last Thursday at age 97. That he had not perished 55 years earlier is a tribute to himself and his colleagues, who took part in “NASA’s finest hour.”
As the commander of the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970, Lovell helped rescue his spacecraft — not to mention his life and the lives of his two colleagues — from a mid-flight explosion that blew much of it up. The accident nixed his flight’s official mission of a moon landing, but Lovell and NASA showed their true skill by improvising solutions to bring the spacecraft back to Earth — in some ways, a tougher test than a lunar landing.
Capstone to a Career
Like most “Space Race” astronauts, Lovell’s Apollo missions capped off a life in flight. A son of the Midwest, Lovell attended the University of Wisconsin for two years before completing his studies at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he, among other things, studied liquid-propulsion rockets. After completing flight training and serving as an aircraft carrier pilot, he graduated at the top of his class from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School.
Lovell narrowly missed the cut to serve as one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts in 1959, but was named to the second class of the astronaut corps three years later. Two Gemini missions then followed, the first of which tested astronauts’ stamina during long durations in space, and the second of which saw Lovell’s colleague Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin help perfect the rendezvous and spacewalking techniques that would prove so critical during Project Apollo.
By the end of his career, Lovell had spent over 715 hours, or nearly one month, in space. That doesn’t count the 48 hours that Lovell and two colleagues spent bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico in April 1968 to ensure that the Apollo spacecraft would prove seaworthy following an ocean splashdown. (Naval Academy graduate Lovell said his stomach didn’t mind the tests, which included turning the spacecraft upside down in the water. His colleagues Charlie Duke and Stu Roosa weren’t so lucky.)
In December 1968, Lovell, along with Frank Borman and Bill Anders, served on the first official trip to the moon, the Apollo 8 mission that tested out the powerful Saturn V rocket. Apollo 8 didn’t land on the moon (the lunar lander had yet to be completed), but the Christmas Eve message that Lovell, Borman, and Anders read out featuring words from the book of Genesis proved one of the most dramatic and moving moments in television history:
‘Houston, We’ve Had a Problem’
Sixteen months later, Lovell had his second moon mission, this one with a scheduled landing. While Apollo 13 had a lunar lander — a more than capable one, as events would prove — the service module would be its undoing. Wiring flaws in one of the oxygen tanks led to a fire and an explosion, which burst one oxygen tank and caused the second to leak.
Within hours, the crew — Lovell, Fred Haise, and last-minute replacement Jack Swigert — had to evacuate the service module, using the lunar lander as a “lifeboat” until they could return to Earth’s orbit. Completing a series of maneuvers that had barely been contemplated, much less tried, the crew, along with teams at NASA Mission Control in Houston, improvised all manner of tasks to keep the mission afloat.
The Ron Howard movie Apollo 13, based on a book Lovell co-wrote with Jeffrey Kluger, chronicles the myriad pitfalls and narrow escapes the crew overcame. Working with little sleep, in a spacecraft with near-freezing temperatures, Lovell and his colleagues executed their mission, knowing that failure to do so would mean near-certain death as the world’s first crew marooned in space.
Metaphor for Life
In many ways, Apollo 13 serves as a metaphor that most humans can relate to. While few of us will face life-and-death situations in outer space, we all face setbacks during life — things that don’t go right, obstacles we must overcome. The crew of Apollo 13 overcame those setbacks. And while they didn’t land on the Moon, they gave Americans a newfound appreciation for NASA’s dedication and pluck, at a time when spaceflight had become almost routine to the public.
Today, as in 1970, spaceflight remains far from routine. But overcoming obstacles happens every day. For the past 55 years, Jim Lovell served as living proof of what man can accomplish when he puts his mind to it — a fact that should continue to serve as inspiration to us all. Requiescat in pace.