Today the falgs of the United States and of NASA fly at half staff in memory of Capt. James A. Lovell, Jr., USN (Retired), who was the Command Module Pilot of Appollo 8 and the Commander of Apollo 13.
Lovell was the first man to fly to space four times, on Gemini 7 and 12, as well as Apollo 8 and 13. Selected as a part of the second group of astronauts, known as the New Nine, he was a pioneer in many ways. He and Gemini 7 crewmate Frank Borman held the record for longest crewed space flight until Soyuz 9 in 1970 and the longest crewed spaceflight in US history until Skylab 2 in 1973.
Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to visit the moon, putting their spacecraft into orbit on December 24, 1968. This was the first time humans had gone to the moon. After ten orbits, they came back to earth, splashing down on December 27, 1968. The famous Earthrise photo, an image of the earth rising over the moon’s surface, was taken by Lovell’s crewmate Bill Anders on this mission, .
Lovell was the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, which was originally slated to be the third landing on the moon. On the way to the moon, due to a manufacturing fault, the crew experienced an explosion on the side of the service module, which caused the loss of the vast majority of oxygen carried by the spacecraft. Lovell and crewmates Ken Mattingly and Fred Haise continued their journey to the moon, used its gravity to change the spacecraft’s trajectory to a heading back to Earth, and made it home safely. The Apollo 13 crew still holds the record for the farthest distance that humans have ever traveled from Earth. The APollo 13 mission was a greta example of astronauts and mission controllers working together to solve seemingly insurmountable problems and bring the crew home safely. The story of this mission was dramatically recreated, based on Lovell’s book about the mission, in the 1995 film Apollo 13. Lovell’s communication to Mission Control after the incident, “Houston, we’ve had a problem” was changed in the film to, “Houston, we have a problem” in the movie.
Apollo 13 was Lovell’s final space flight. After retiring from NASA and the Navy in 1973, he returned home to Chicago and worked in the corporate world until retirement in 1991. He lived in Lake Forest, Illinois until his death on August 7, 2025.
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