He was an American hero.
Jim Lovell, the astronaut who settled in north suburban Lake Forest after a career that included four space missions, culminating in heroically guiding the Apollo 13 back to Earth after an explosion crippled part of the spacecraft, died Thursday at his home in Lake Forest. He was 97. The cause of death wasn’t immediately clear.
“Jim’s character and steadfast courage helped our nation reach the Moon and turned a potential tragedy into a success from which we learned an enormous amount,” NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said in a statement released Friday announcing his death. “We mourn his passing even as we celebrate his achievements.”
He was the last surviving member of the first two batches of NASA astronauts.
‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’
Apollo 13 launched April 11, 1970, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
After an oxygen tank exploded on the command module two days after takeoff, Mr. Lovell, who commanded the mission, famously said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” (The line, corrupted by pop culture, became “Houston, we have a problem.”)
Working with NASA mission control on Earth, Mr. Lovell and his two crewmates devised a makeshift carbon monoxide filter out of plastic, cardboard and duct tape to save themselves from choking on their own exhaled breath.
Astronaut James Lovell, Apollo 13 commander, poses for a portrait in his space suit on Feb. 16, 1970. Apollo 13 launched April 11, 1970, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After an oxygen tank exploded on the command module two days after takeoff, Mr. Lovell and his two crewmates devised a makeshift carbon monoxide filter out of plastic, cardboard and duct tape to save themselves from choking on their own exhaled breath.
AP file
After passing behind the moon, the three used the spacecraft’s lunar module, which had been designed for two people, as a lifeboat of sorts to safely return to Earth.
Mr. Lovell was elated to be alive, yet disappointed they were unable to carry out their planned moon landing. It would have been NASA’s third, and Mr. Lovell was slated to be one of the mission’s two moon walkers.
At a subsequent news conference, when a reporter asked him if he planned to return to space, Mr. Lovell, flanked by NASA brass, was about to seize the opportunity to answer in the affirmative until he noticed a hand raise up in the back of the room to form a thumbs-down sign.
It belonged to his wife, Marilyn, who wondered if she was to become a widow as she watched television coverage of the mission.
Mr. Lovell quickly changed course: “Well, you know, I think we better let some other people try it,” he recalled with a hearty laugh in an interview with USA Today in 2020 marking the mission’s 50th anniversary.
Tens of millions of Americans watched the televised splashdown of the spacecraft in the South Pacific on April 17, 1970.
In the hit 1995 movie about the Apollo 13 mission, actor Tom Hanks played Mr. Lovell, and Mr. Lovell played the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the recovery ship that met the astronauts upon their return to Earth.
Sense of wonder, not competition, drove Mr. Lovell
Mr. Lovell’s three previous missions went more smoothly.
In December of 1968, he was aboard Apollo 8 on a six-day mission with Frank Borman and William Anders when the trio became the first humans to fly to and orbit the moon.
The crew mesmerized an estimated billion people in 64 countries on Christmas Eve as they broadcast televised images of the moon and Earth while reading passages from the book of Genesis. Time magazine voted the crew its “Men of the Year.”
The mission also produced the famous “earthrise” photo that showed part of the moon and a distant Earth and provided a positive end to a year marked by protests, riots, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
In 1966, Mr. Lovell orbited Earth for nearly four days aboard Gemini 12 with Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, who went on three spacewalks.
His first spaceflight took place in 1965, when Mr. Lovell orbited Earth for nearly 14 days aboard Gemini 7.
The accomplishments played out during the “space race” in which the United States and Soviet Union sought to outdo each other.
The competition arguably peaked when Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first men to walk on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 11 mission. Mr. Lovell would have replaced Armstrong on that mission if he’d gotten sick or otherwise was unable to go.
But it was a sense of wonder, not competition that drove Mr. Lovell.
“To me, this was a real adventure,” he told the Sun-Times in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission. “It was like a mini Lewis and Clark expedition. I wasn’t there to beat the Russians; I didn’t really care if we beat the Russians or not. I was there because we were exploring new ground, new territory.”
Adler held unique place in his heart
When a curator from the Adler Planetarium reached out to Mr. Lovell seeking items for an exhibit, he provided a tour of the basement of his Lake Forest home, began dusting off items and asked, “which ones do you want?”
The items on display at the “Mission: Moon” exhibit, which debuted in 2006 and centers on Mr. Lovell’s space travels, include the flight suit he wore on Apollo 8 and flight manuals from Apollo 13, as well as the helmet and gloves he would have worn on his moonwalk that never took place.
His favorite item in the entire Adler collection is a photograph of a triangular mountain on the near side of the moon on the shore of the Sea of Tranquility that Mr. Lovell named Mount Marilyn, after his wife. She passed away in 2023.
“It looks on us every day and night, from the moon back to the Earth,” he said in the 2018 interview.
Mr. Lovell was a lifelong supporter of the museum, where he was a longtime board member and key fundraiser. It held a unique place in his heart.
When he was a Boy Scout growing up in Milwaukee, he visited the museum to work toward his astronomy merit badge. He later became an Eagle Scout.
Mr. Lovell was born March 25, 1928, in Cleveland, Ohio, to James Lovell Sr. and Blanche Lovell.
After his father, a furnace salesman, died in a car accident in 1940, his mother moved with her only child to Milwaukee to work for her brother.
In high school, Mr. Lovell became fascinated with rocketry and built homemade rockets. One traveled about 80 feet up before exploding.
He even wrote a letter to the American Rocket Society asking for advice on how to become a rocket engineer and, in return, received a few suggestions of college courses he should take, he said in a 2015 interview with the National World War II Museum.
On one trip to Chicago as a kid, he showed up at the headquarters of a chemical manufacturing association to ask for information on the components of rocket fuel.
“Someone came out and had a nice chat and gave him some information and sent him on his way,” recalled Andrew Johnston, Adler’s vice president of museum experience and collections, who noted that Mr. Lovell often shared the story with groups of young students.
‘One of a kind’
After being rejected from the United States Naval Academy, Mr. Lovell completed two years at the University of Wisconsin before he reapplied and was accepted to the Naval Academy through a program that sought to replenish the ranks of naval aviators who returned to civilian life after World War II.
He graduated in 1954 and served on the West Coast and aboard an aircraft carrier in the West Pacific before transitioning to a career as a test pilot with the Navy.
Mr. Lovell met his future wife when he was 16 and she was 14. The couple had three kids by the time he was studying for exams to become a test pilot in 1958.
To get some peace and quiet in the family’s cramped naval quarters, he used a board of plywood to create a desk in his closet and put on a helicopter pilot’s helmet to drown out the noise of his family.
After NASA was formed in 1958, Mr. Lovell applied to become one of the agency’s first group of astronauts, but flunked the physical. He applied again in 1962 when NASA was forming its second group of astronauts. This time he was accepted.
His 29.8 days spent in space were a record until NASA’s first space station came online in the ’70s and allowed for extended stays.
Mr. Lovell retired from NASA in 1973 and moved into the corporate world.
He moved from Texas to Lake Forest in 1982 when he was a top executive with the telecommunications company Centel Corp. He retired in 1991.
In 1999, Mr. Lovell and his family opened a restaurant, Lovells of Lake Forest, that was operated by his son, chef Jay Lovell. It closed in 2015.
Mr. Lovell promoted further exploration of the moon and hoped NASA would perfect traveling there as a precursor to a manned mission to Mars.
Perhaps his biggest epiphany occurred on Apollo 8 when he held his thumb up to Earth and realized his thumb fit over the entire planet.
“Six billion people there, all these problems, all this stuff going on … and when I put my thumb up there, it disappears,” he said in the interview with the National World War II Museum.
“We often say, ‘I hope to go to heaven when we die,’ and I thought, you know, we go to heaven when we’re born,” he said, noting the astronomically rare conditions offered by Earth to sustain life — its mass, gravity, water and distance from sun.
“People should think about it next time they see a beautiful sunset or feel a cool breeze on their cheek,” he said.
A statue depicting Mr. Lovell holding his thumb up can be seen at the Adler Planetarium.
“He was always happy to meet people and take pictures; he understood the power of connecting people with space and he shared that joyfully. The smile on his face wasn’t fake,” Johnston said.
In a statement, his family hailed him as their “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,” his family said. “He was truly one of a kind.”
Contributing: AP