Jim Lovell

• 1. Introduction

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  Jim Lovell flew to the Moon twice and never set foot on it. That distinction alone would make him one of the most unusual figures in the history of human spaceflight. But what truly separates Lovell from the dozen men who did walk on the lunar surface is the nature of his second voyage: a near-catastrophe in April 1970 that forced him to navigate a crippled spacecraft around the Moon and bring his crew home alive.

  The questions Lovell's story raises are not only about survival. They are about what kind of person seeks out the frontier four times, what kind of training makes improvisation possible under lethal pressure, and how a man who lost his shot at walking on the Moon still managed to shape the history of space exploration as profoundly as anyone who did.

• 2. Roots and the Navy Path

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  James Arthur Lovell Jr. was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on the 25th of March, 1928. His father, a furnace salesman born in Toronto, died in a car accident in 1933, when Lovell was just five years old. For two years after that loss, Lovell and his mother lived with a relative in Terre Haute, Indiana, before they moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Lovell attended Juneau High School.

  As a teenager, he was already building flying model rockets. He earned Eagle Scout rank, the highest the Boy Scouts offer, and it foreshadowed the methodical, goal-oriented discipline that would define his career. After high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison under the Navy's "Flying Midshipman" program from 1946 to 1948. He later credited that program with making college possible, saying he otherwise lacked the money to attend. He supplemented his Navy stipend by washing dishes, busing tables at a local restaurant, and caring for the university's lab rats and mice on weekends.

  When the Navy began cutting the Flying Midshipman program, Lovell moved quickly to secure his future. He obtained a nomination from his local U.S. Representative, John C. Brophy, and entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in July 1948. During his first year there, he wrote a treatise on the liquid-propellant rocket engine. He graduated in the spring of 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree.

  His path through the Navy's aviation pipeline was distinguished from the start. He earned his designation as a naval aviator on the 1st of February, 1954, flew McDonnell F2H Banshee night fighters in the Western Pacific, and accumulated 107 carrier landings. In January 1958, he entered a six-month test pilot training course at Naval Air Station Patuxent River with Class 20, which also included future astronauts Wally Schirra and Pete Conrad. Conrad gave Lovell the nickname "Shaky". Lovell graduated at the top of the class.

• 3. The Door That Almost Closed

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  Lovell, Conrad, and Schirra were among 110 military test pilots selected as astronaut candidates for Project Mercury. Schirra made it through and became one of the Mercury Seven. Lovell did not, because a routine medical screen found a temporarily elevated bilirubin count in his blood.

  He did not give up. In 1962, NASA opened its second astronaut selection to a public process, and Lovell found out about it through an advertisement in Aviation Week and Space Technology. A selection panel that included Mercury Seven astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton narrowed the candidates to 32 finalists, who underwent medical examinations at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. This time Lovell's results were clean.

  On the 14th of September, Slayton called to tell him he had been accepted. To avoid alerting reporters, Lovell checked into the Rice Hotel in Houston under the name of Max Peck, the hotel's general manager. On the 17th of September, the new group was officially announced at the 1800-seat Cullen Auditorium at the University of Houston. They became known as the "Next Nine" or the "New Nine". By October, they had moved to the Houston area, and Lovell and Conrad built houses in Timber Cove, south of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Developers there offered astronauts mortgages with small down payments and low interest rates.

  The training that followed was rigorous and wide-ranging: classroom instruction in spacecraft propulsion, orbital mechanics, astronomy, computing, and space medicine; jungle survival in the Panama Canal Zone; desert survival at Stead Air Force Base in Nevada; and water survival on Galveston Bay. Within the group, each astronaut was assigned a technical specialty to develop and share. Lovell's area was recovery systems, a choice that would carry quiet irony given the mission that would come to define him.

• 4. Gemini: Learning to Work in Space

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  Lovell's first spaceflight came aboard Gemini 7, which lifted off on the 4th of December, 1965, with Frank Borman as command pilot. The mission's primary goal was to evaluate the effects of fourteen days in orbit, long enough to approximate a lunar voyage and give doctors the data they needed. Lovell, who was taller than Borman, had more difficulty getting in and out of the spacesuit in the cramped cabin. Mission controllers eventually allowed both astronauts to remove their suits, a concession to the uncomfortable heat the suits generated.

  While Gemini 7 was in orbit, Gemini 6A, commanded by Schirra with Tom Stafford as pilot, rendezvoused with it on Gemini 6A's fourth orbit. The two spacecraft flew in tandem for three orbits, with the distance between them varying between 0.30 and 90 meters. In the final two days of the mission, Lovell found time to read part of Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds. The flight lasted the full fourteen days, making 206 orbits.

  Lovell's second Gemini flight, Gemini 12, gave him his first command. It was the final Gemini mission, and its goals were unclear at the outset. Lovell later recalled that it "didn't have a mission" and was "by default supposed to wind up the Gemini program". The purpose that emerged was mastering extravehicular activity, which had proven harder than expected on earlier missions.

  Lovell's crewmate on Gemini 12 was Buzz Aldrin, who had written his doctoral thesis on orbital rendezvous. That expertise proved critical when the rendezvous radar failed after launch on the 11th of November, 1966. Aldrin used a sextant to measure the angle to the Agena target vehicle and calculated the required maneuvers manually. Lovell flew the spacecraft accordingly, and they achieved rendezvous and docking. Aldrin then performed three EVAs totaling well over four hours. Gemini 12 returned to Earth on the 15th of November after 59 orbits, completing the work that cleared the path for Apollo.

• 5. First Journey to the Moon

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  Apollo 8 launched on the 21st of December, 1968, and Borman, Lovell, and Anders became the first crew to ride the Saturn V, and the first to travel beyond Earth orbit toward the Moon. Lovell's role was command module pilot and navigator, using the spacecraft's sextant to measure star positions and calculate mid-course corrections.

  On Christmas Eve, the crew broadcast black-and-white television pictures of the lunar surface back to Earth. Each of the three astronauts read a passage from the Book of Genesis. After completing ten orbits of the Moon in 20 hours and ten minutes, they fired the engine on the Moon's far side, out of radio contact with Earth, to begin the journey home. When contact was re-established, Lovell broadcast, "Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus." The spacecraft splashed down safely before dawn on the 27th of December, after 147 hours of flight, having traveled an estimated 504,006 nautical miles.

  During one navigational data entry, Lovell accidentally erased part of the computer's memory by entering the wrong codes. The inertial measurement unit registered the module as having its pre-launch orientation and began firing thrusters to "correct" for that phantom attitude. Lovell spent roughly ten minutes calculating the correct values, then used the thrusters to align the stars Rigel and Sirius in the sextant, and another fifteen minutes re-entering the measurements. He would draw on exactly that skill two years later, when re-entering orientation data under far graver circumstances.

  Lovell also named a feature on the Moon's surface, Mount Marilyn, in honor of his wife. That name, chosen by a navigator in a quiet moment between sextant sightings, remains attached to the feature.

• 6. Apollo 13 and the Art of the Miracle

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  Lovell lifted off aboard Apollo 13 on the 11th of April, 1970. He and Fred Haise were to land near the Fra Mauro crater, a site believed to hold material thrown out by the ancient impact that had filled the Imbrium basin and that might yield clues to the early history of both the Earth and the Moon. The crew never made it.

  During a routine liquid oxygen tank stir in transit to the Moon, a fire started inside an oxygen tank. The most probable cause NASA later determined was damaged electrical insulation on the wiring that produced a spark. Before the mission, a problem with draining the tank had been reported, and Lovell had approved running the heaters to purge the oxygen rather than replacing the faulty tank, which would have delayed the launch by a month. Neither he nor the launch pad crew knew the tank contained the wrong thermostat switch. The heaters ran for eight hours. That process purged the oxygen but also burned away Teflon insulation from the copper wiring. Liquid oxygen rapidly converted to high-pressure gas, burst the tank, and the escaping gas damaged a second oxygen tank. In just over two hours, all onboard oxygen was lost, disabling the hydrogen fuel cells that powered the Command/Service Module Odyssey.

  Apollo 13 had been flying a non-free-return trajectory to enable exploration of the western lunar regions. The crew used the Lunar Module as a lifeboat, restoring the free-return path and swinging around the Moon to head home. Based on calculations made by flight controllers on Earth, Lovell had to adjust the course twice by manually controlling the Lunar Module's thrusters and engine. His experience re-entering orientation data during Apollo 8 allowed him to perform a similar manual IMU realignment under far more critical conditions, after the unit had been shut down to conserve power.

  The crew splashed down safely on the 17th of April. The mission trajectory had taken Lovell, Haise, and Jack Swigert farther from Earth than any humans had previously traveled, a record that stood until the Artemis II lunar flyby in 2026. Speaking to NASA's "Houston we Have a Podcast" in 2020, Lovell reflected on that ordeal: "You can't suddenly have a problem, and then just you know, close your eyes and then hope there's a miracle coming on, because a miracle is something you have to do yourself, or having people to help you."

• 7. Life After the Moon

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  Lovell retired from the Navy and the space program on the 1st of March, 1973. He moved into business, becoming CEO of the Bay-Houston Towing Company in Houston, then president of Fisk Telephone Systems in 1977, and eventually an executive vice president at Centel Corporation in Chicago, from which he retired on the 1st of January, 1991.

  In 1994, Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger wrote Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Ron Howard adapted it into the 1995 film Apollo 13. Lovell's initial instinct was that Kevin Costner would be a good choice to play him, given a physical resemblance, but Tom Hanks was cast. Hanks visited Lovell and his wife Marilyn at their home in Texas and flew with Lovell in his private airplane to prepare for the role. Kathleen Quinlan was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for her performance as Marilyn. Lovell himself appeared in the film in a cameo as a naval officer, cast as the ship's skipper, Captain Leland Kirkemo. When the filmmakers offered to make his character an admiral, Lovell declined: "I retired as a captain and a captain I will be."

  In 1999, the Lovell family opened a restaurant in Lake Forest, Illinois, called Lovell's of Lake Forest. The space displayed memorabilia from his NASA years and from the filming of Apollo 13. It closed in April 2015. Lovell's wife, Marilyn, died on the 27th of August, 2023, at the age of 93. Lovell died on the 7th of August, 2025, at his home in Lake Forest, at the age of 97.

  On the 6th of April, 2026, on Flight Day 6 of the Artemis II mission, NASA played for the crew a special audio message that Lovell had recorded before his death. The voice of the man who had first broadcast "there is a Santa Claus" from lunar orbit traveled once more in the direction of the Moon.