NASA astronaut Jim Lovell helped turn the near-dimmed Apollo 13 Moon Mission into a moving story of ingenuity and survival, but passed away at the age of 97.
Jim Lovell passed away Thursday (August 7) in Lake Forest, Illinois, NASA officials said. However, four pioneering spaceflight veterans, astronauts left their mark on future agents and countries.
“The character of the gym and its unshakable courage have made our country reach the moon, transforming potential tragedy into success, and learning a huge amount from it,” NASA administrator Sean Duffy said in a statement Friday (August 8th). “We celebrate his achievements and still bemoan his passing.”
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Lovell joined NASA in September 1962, and was part of the second astronaut class astronauts. Among his eight colleagues in that group were Neil Armstrong and Ed White of Apollo 11 Moonwalker, who were the first Americans to walk through space.
Lovell first flew into space on a Gemini 7 in December 1965. The Gemini 7 was a two-week mission featuring the first rendezvous of two maneuverable crew spacecraft in Earth orbit. Two extreme Gemini 6A capsules came within just a few feet of the Gemini 7 (carrying Ravel and Frank Bowman) on our planet on December 15th of that year.
On November 11, 1966, Ravel and Buzz Aldrin were released on Gemini 12 and traveled the globe for four days. This was the ultimate mission of the Gemini programme, primarily designed to pave the way for the Apollo Moon Push.
Related: Scientists scan famous “Earthrise” craters on mission to find alien life in our solar system
Lovell’s third space flight was the Apollo 8. This was the first crew to cross Earth’s orbit. He served as a pilot and navigator for the command module on a six-day flight in December 1968, which successfully went into lunar orbit and returned. His crew were Bolman and William Anders, who took photos of the famous “Earthrise” that Christmas Eve.
The Apollo 13 then appeared in April 1970, during which Label became the first person to reach space four times. He led the mission. This also includes the Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise and command module pilot Jack Swigert.
Lovell and Haise were supposed to be the fifth and sixth people to date to walk the moon, but according to the plan. The oxygen tanks on the mission’s command and service module exploded, damaging the spacecraft, forcing the three astronauts into survival mode.
They abandoned the Moonlanding Plan and, in collaboration with Houston’s mission control, “turning their moon module, “Aquarius,” into an effective lifeboat,” NASA officials wrote in their official biographies of Lovell.
“Their emergency activation and operation of the lunar module system preserved both power and water while in space and back to Earth, with sufficient supply to ensure safety and survival,” the official added.
Lovell wrote about this experience in Lost Moon: The Dangerous Voyage of Apollo 13 (Houghton Mifflin, 1994). The book he co-authored with science journalist Jeffrey Kruger, and was the basis for the 1995 film Apollo 13.
Coincidentally, the film popularized the phrase “Houston, we have a problem.” But it’s not completely accurate. The actual quote from both Lovell and Swigert is, “Houston, there was a problem.”
James A. Lovell was born on March 25, 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree. That same year he married Marilyn Gerlach. They have four children together. (Marilyn passed away in September 202.)
From 1958 to 1962, Lovell served as a test pilot at the Naval Aviation Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland. During some of it, he joined the service Supersonic jet aircraft, which was manager of the Navy’s F4H “Phantom” fighter program and was built by McDonnell Douglas.
Overall, Lovell recorded more than 7,000 hours of flight times, but more than half of them were included in the jet, according to NASA biographies.
Lovell retired from the Navy and NASA in March 1973, two years after completing his senior management program at Harvard Business School. He then served several high-level jobs, including executive vice president of Chicago-based telecom company Centel Corp., a post he retired on January 1, 1991.
Lovell was the oldest surviving Apollo astronaut. The distinction now goes to Aldrin, 95. Of the 24 astronauts who flew to the moon during the Apollo era, only five are still alive.
This article was originally published on Space
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