James A. Lovell Jr., the commander of the three-man Apollo 13 spacecraft that survived a near catastrophic explosion as it approached the moon in April 1970, before safely returning to Earth in an extraordinary rescue operation, died on Thursday in Lake Forest, Ill. He was 97.
His death was announced by NASA in a statement.
Captain Lovell, a former Navy test pilot, flew for some 715 hours in space, the most of any astronaut in the pioneering Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs forged by the United States as it vied with the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
He took part in two Gemini missions that orbited Earth and was one of the three astronauts aboard Apollo 8, the first spaceflight to orbit the moon, before he was chosen by NASA for Apollo 13.
The purpose of the mission was to land Captain Lovell and Fred W. Haise Jr. on the moon while the third member of the crew, John L. Swigert Jr., orbited in the spaceship to awaiting their return. They were to explore a spot called Fra Mauro, a highland area whose topography could provide important insights into the moon’s geology.
Captain Lovell never realized his dream of reaching the lunar surface. But he became something of a pop culture figure when he was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the 1995 movie “Apollo 13,” which drew on Captain Lovell’s book “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13” (1994), written with Jeffrey Kluger.
The phrase “Houston, we have a problem,” Mr. Hanks’s version of Captain Lovell’s call to NASA ground control when an explosion rocked his spaceship, became a part of the American lexicon, a wry way of signaling that something was amiss.
But the movie engaged in some artistic license.
In the real-life Apollo 13, it was the command module pilot, Mr. Swigert, who first told NASA there was trouble. Captain Lovell echoed his words when NASA asked for the message to be repeated. Both of the men had said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
Mr. Swigert’s alert was not in the movie, and Captain Lovell’s exact wording was altered to provide a more dramatic sense of immediacy.
The plight of Apollo 13 in 1970 transfixed Americans. The capsule was nearly 56 minutes into its flight and some 200,000 miles from Earth when the astronauts heard that ominous bang. Red lights signaling system failures glowed on their console. Captain Lovell, along with Mr. Swigert and Mr. Haise, civilians but also former test pilots who were making their first spaceflight, joined the scientists and technical experts on the ground to improvise a plan that might bring the crew home safely.
“At first, we thought it was a meteor strike,” Captain Lovell told The Chicago Tribune 35 years later. “We knew that would cause a puncture that would allow all our air to escape, leaving us dead in a few minutes. When we realized that it wasn’t a meteor, we very quickly got busy figuring out what did happen and how we could get back home.”
Unknown to the crew, wires inside one of the two oxygen tanks in the spacecraft’s service module — which fed cold liquid oxygen to the fuel cells that produced electricity and drinking water for the command module, and provided the crew’s breathable air — had been damaged before installation. When Mr. Swigert flipped a switch to carry out a routine task, the maneuver generated a spark that ignited the wires’ insulation. The tank ruptured, emptying its contents into space. The other oxygen tank was left damaged and leaking.
The rescue plan was this: Use the spacecraft’s undamaged lunar module, which had been designed to descend to the moon with Captain Lovell and Mr. Swigert and was equipped with its own oxygen and electrical supply, as a lifeboat for the three astronauts. But the lunar lander was intended to carry only two astronauts for up to two days.
All three crewmen crowded into it, turning off the module’s lights and heaters to conserve its life-sustaining energy. An immediate U-turn for the journey home was considered too risky, so the spacecraft looped around the moon before making a slingshot-like maneuver to kick off its return to Earth.
The crew endured temperatures of 38 degrees in the powered-down lunar module. To ease their dehydration during the journey, the astronauts chewed on packages of hot dogs for moisture. They improvised with common materials, and at one point used duct tape and a wool sock for part of an air-filtering contraption.
“We rubbed our hands together and stamped our boots to keep warm,” Captain Lovell later told a congressional committee.
Captain Lovell maneuvered the rocket firing to get the spacecraft on a course for the trip home, and as the astronauts approached Earth they moved back into the nearly lifeless command module, which bore the heat shield needed for the descent through the Earth’s atmosphere. After jettisoning the crippled service module and the lunar module, the astronauts drew on the last of the command module’s battery power and reserve oxygen to make it to a splashdown in the Pacific.
On a partly cloudy afternoon on April 17, 610 miles southeast of American Samoa, three large orange and white parachutes were spotted over the aircraft carrier Iwo Jima, the spaceflight’s recovery ship. The capsule splashed down at 1:07 p.m. Eastern time, six days after liftoff and three days and 16 hours after its power supplies had been crippled. The astronauts were quickly plucked from the ocean and greeted by the ship’s commander, Capt. Leland E. Kirkemo, who was played by Captain Lovell in the “Apollo 13” movie.
In a nation battered by domestic turmoil and devastated by Vietnam War casualties, the safe return of the astronauts lifted spirits and renewed attention to the space program, which had already drifted in the aftermath of the first two manned landings on the moon.
President Richard M. Nixon flew to Hawaii to award the astronauts the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the crew embarked on a good-will trip abroad.
James Arthur Lovell Jr., who was known as Jim, was born in Cleveland on March 25, 1928, the only child of Arthur and Blanche (Masek) Lovell. His father, a salesman for a coal furnace company, died in an auto accident when he was a child, and the boy and his mother settled in Milwaukee, where he attended high school.
He was intrigued by the possibility of space travel, and as a teenager he and a friend built a rocket using gunpowder. It blew up in midair, but his life course was set.
He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for two years, then entered the Naval Academy, graduating in 1952. After serving as a Navy test pilot, he was selected in September 1962 as a NASA astronaut in a group that would be trained for Gemini and Apollo flights.
Captain Lovell’s first space mission came in December 1965 when he orbited Earth with Lt. Col. Frank Borman in Gemini 7, a flight of more than 330 hours that included the first rendezvous of two manned spacecraft, the type of maneuver that would have to be carried out for a moon landing.
Captain Lovell commanded Gemini 12 in November 1966, flying with Maj. Buzz Aldrin of the Air Force, who in July 1969 became the second man to walk on the moon, after Neil Armstrong, in the flight of Apollo 11.
Gemini 12 carried out 59 orbits of Earth over four days to close out the Gemini program.
Captain Lovell was the command module pilot on the six-day journey of Apollo 8 at Christmastime 1968, joining with Colonel Borman and Maj. William A. Anders as the first men to orbit the moon, looping around it 10 times.
“The moon is essentially gray, no color,” Captain Lovell reported in a telecast seen by millions around the world. “Looks like plaster of Paris.”
Soon after that transmission, Major Anders captured what became an iconic color photo of Earth, appearing like a blue marble in the heavens. The image, known as Earthrise, is considered an inspiration for the environmental movement.
The astronauts ended their Christmas Eve telecast by reading from the Book of Genesis, telling of the creation of Earth.
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night,” Captain Lovell read. “And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
Captain Lovell retired from NASA and the Navy in March 1973. He was named president and chief executive of the Bay-Houston Towing Company in 1975 and was later a senior executive at telecommunications companies. He was the owner of Lovell Communications, a Chicago-area consulting firm that provides marketing and public relations advice to corporations. His family owned and operated a restaurant in Lake Forest, Ill., that featured memorabilia from his space career. It closed in 2015.
Immediate information on survivors was not available.
As they scrambled to survive in space, Captain Lovell and his Apollo 13 crew had no time for fear. “We were all test pilots, and the only thing we could do was try to get home,” Captain Lovell told The New York Times. “The idea of despair never occurred to us, because we were always optimistic we would get home.”
Captain Lovell never achieved his goal of walking on the moon. But, he told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 35 years after Apollo 13 had passed into history, he had found an important consolation with the passing of the years.
“I realized that although I didn’t land on the moon and was disappointed,” he said, “it was a triumph in a different direction, meaning getting people back from a certain catastrophe.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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