The commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission
Jim Lovell, who has died aged 97, uttered what is perhaps the second most famous phrase in space history. The US astronaut was the commander of the three-man Apollo 13 lunar mission that took off from the Kennedy Space Center in April 1970. It had been nearly a year since the first Moon landing, said Erica Wagner in The Observer, and interest in the US' space programme had waned. No major TV networks transmitted this mission's broadcast from space. But on the third day, when the crew were 200,000 miles from Earth, the flick of a switch for a routine task set off an explosion. Caused by an undetected wiring fault, the blast ruptured one of the craft's oxygen tanks, emptying its contents into space, and damaged the other, which started to leak, disabling the supply of power, water and air to the service module. "Houston, we've had a problem," said Lovell, with considerable understatement.
He and his crew were now in mortal danger, but with the same cool head, and against all the odds, he would steer them back to safety over the next three days – a nail-biting drama that transfixed millions of people across the world. In 1995, this remarkable event was lodged yet deeper in the public imagination by the film "Apollo 13". In it, Tom Hanks delivered Lovell's famous line in the present tense, for dramatic effect, said The Times; but with oxygen escaping and the service module rapidly shutting down, there had been "no need to embellish the drama at the time".
James Arthur Lovell Jr was born in Cleveland in 1928. His father, a salesman, was killed in a car accident when Jim was an infant; after that, he and his mother settled in Milwaukee, where he attended high school. He was intrigued by rockets as a child, and after graduating from college, he enrolled in a US Naval Academy. Having served as a navy test pilot, he was selected, in 1962, for a Nasa astronaut programme. His first space mission, Gemini 7, was in 1965. In 1968, he was on the Apollo 8 mission that was the first to orbit the Moon, and which captured the famous Earthrise photo. He had spent many hundreds of hours in space by the time he led Apollo 13; but his two crew were making their first flights.
It was Jack Swiggart who alerted Houston to the fact that they "had a problem"; Lovell's message confirmed it. After that, Nasa rapidly assembled thousands of aerospace experts to oversee a rescue plan. This involved the men crowding into the undamaged lunar module, said The Telegraph, which had a power supply of its own, and using its engines to propel Apollo around the Moon and back to Earth. However, the module was only equipped to carry two men, for two days, said The New York Times. They turned off lights and heaters to conserve energy, enduring temperatures as low as 3C; chewed hot dogs to avoid dehydrating; and improvised – such as by using duct tape and a sock to fix an air filter. After three days, they climbed back into the command module, which was the only part of the craft able to withstand re-entry. Splashing down into the Pacific, they were met by the USS Iwo Jima. In the film, Lovell appears in a cameo role as its captain. Their safe return did much to raise spirits in an America "battered by domestic turmoil and devastated by Vietnam War casualties", and within hours, Richard Nixon had awarded Lovell the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour. He retired from Nasa three years later, and went on to work in telecommunications.
A modest, easy-going man, he always stressed that the rescue of Apollo 13 had been a team effort. Years later, he admitted that he was disappointed that he had not achieved his dream of walking on the Moon, but added that "the mission itself, and the fact that we triumphed over certain catastrophe, does give me a deep sense of satisfaction". He was married for more than 70 years to his wife Marilyn, with whom he had four children. She died in 2023.
