American astronaut Jim
Lovell, commander of the failed 1970 mission to the moon that
nearly ended in disaster but became an inspirational saga of
survival and the basis for the hit movie “Apollo 13,” has died
at the age of 97, NASA said on Friday.
Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks played Lovell in director Ron
Howard’s acclaimed 1995 film. It recounted NASA’s Apollo 13
mission, which was planned as humankind’s third lunar landing
but went horribly wrong when an onboard explosion on the way to
the moon put the lives of the three astronauts in grave danger.
Lovell and crew mates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise endured
frigid, cramped conditions, dehydration and hunger for 3-1\/2
days while concocting with Mission Control in Houston ingenious
solutions to bring the crippled spacecraft safely back to Earth.
“A ‘successful failure’ describes exactly what (Apollo) 13
was – because it was a failure in its initial mission – nothing
had really been accomplished,” Lovell told Reuters in 2010 in an
interview marking the 40th anniversary of the flight.
The outcome, the former Navy test pilot said, was “a great
success in the ability of people to take an almost-certain
catastrophe and turn it into a successful recovery.”
The Apollo 13 mission came nine months after Neil Armstrong
had become the first person to walk on the moon when he took
“one giant leap for mankind” during the Apollo 11 mission on
July 20, 1969.
There was drama even before Apollo 13’s launch on April 11,
1970. Days earlier, the backup lunar module pilot inadvertently
exposed the crew to German measles but Lovell and Haise were
immune to it. Ken Mattingly, the command module pilot, had no
immunity to measles and was replaced at the last minute by
rookie astronaut Swigert.
The mission generally went smoothly for its first two days.
But moments after the crew finished a TV broadcast showing how
they lived in space, an exposed wire in a command module oxygen
tank sparked an explosion that badly damaged the spacecraft
200,000 miles (320,000 km) from Earth. The accident not only
ruined their chances of landing on the moon but imperiled their
lives.
“Suddenly there’s a ‘hiss-bang. And the spacecraft rocks
back and forth,'” Lovell said in a 1999 NASA oral history
interview. “The lights come on and jets fire. And I looked at
Haise to see if he knew what caused it. He had no idea. Looked
at Jack Swigert. He had no idea. And then, of course, things
started to happen.”
‘HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM’
Swigert saw a warning light and told Mission Control:
“Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” In the movie, the line is
instead attributed to Lovell and famously delivered by Hanks –
slightly reworded – as: “Houston, we have a problem.”
With a dangerous loss of power, the three astronauts
abandoned the command module and went to the lunar module –
designed for two men to land on the moon. They used it as a
lifeboat for a harrowing 3-1\/2 day return to Earth.
The astronauts and the U.S. space agency experts in Houston
scrambled to figure out how to get the crew safely home with a
limited amount of equipment at their disposal.
Electrical systems were turned off to save energy, sending
temperatures plummeting to near freezing. Water was drastically
rationed, food was short and sleep was nearly impossible. The
crew had to contrive a filter system to remove high levels of
carbon dioxide that could have proven deadly.
“The thought crossed our mind that we were in deep trouble.
But we never dwelled on it,” Lovell said in the NASA interview.
“We never admitted to ourselves that, ‘Hey, we’re not going to
make it.’ Well, only one time – when Fred looked at … the
lunar module and found out we had about 45 hours worth of power
and we were 90 hours from home.”
People worldwide were captivated by the events unfolding in
space – and got a happy ending. The astronauts altered course to
fly a single time around the moon and back to Earth, splashing
down in the Pacific Ocean near Samoa on April 17, 1970.
Lovell never got another chance to walk on the moon after
Apollo 13, which was his fourth and final space trip.
His first trip had been the Gemini 7 mission in 1965,
featuring the first link-up of two manned spacecraft. His second
was Gemini 12 in 1966, the last of the programs that led to the
Apollo moon missions.
Lovell’s third mission was Apollo 8 in December 1968, the
first to orbit the moon. During a telecast to Earth from their
spacecraft on Christmas Eve, Lovell and crew mates Frank Borman
and William Anders read verses from the Bible’s Book of Genesis.
Lovell, who later had a moon crater named in his honor,
retired as an astronaut in 1973, working first for a harbor
towing company and then in telecommunications.
He co-authored a 1994 book, “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage
of Apollo 13,” that became the basis for Howard’s film. Lovell
recalled a meeting with Howard in which the director asked the
astronaut which actor he would want to play him.
“I said, ‘Kevin Costner,'” Lovell said. “And Hanks never
lets me forget that… But Hanks did a great job.”
Lovell made a cameo appearance in the film as the commander
of the U.S. Navy ship that retrieves the astronauts and shakes
hands with Hanks.
James Lovell was born in Cleveland on March 25, 1928. He was
just 5 when his father died and his mother moved the family to
Milwaukee. He became interested in space as a teenager. He
graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1952 and became a test
pilot before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 1962.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
American astronaut JimLovell, commander of the failed 1970 mission to the moon thatnearly ended in disaster but became an inspirational saga ofsurvival and the basis for the hit movie “Apollo 13,” has diedat the age of 97, NASA said on Friday.Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks played Lovell in director RonHoward’s acclaimed 1995 film. It recounted NASA’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n