Outside the Beltway

Jim Lovell, 1928-2025

The pioneering astronaut is gone at 97.

James Joyner · Saturday, August 9, 2025 · 4 comments

New York Times, “James A. Lovell Jr., Commander of Apollo 13, Is Dead at 97“

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.

[…]

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 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, 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.

[…]

In a nation battered by domestic turmoil and devastated by Vietnam War casualties, the safe return of the astronauts lifted American spirits and renewed attention to the space program, which had 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.

[…]

He 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.

President Nixon awarded Captain Lovell the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970, considered the highest civilian honor bestowed in the United States. In 1995, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

I was four years old when the Apollo 13 mission took place and have no memory of it in real time, but the Tom Hanks movie certainly cemented it in my consciousness. It came out during a period of deep nostalgia for the early space program, with the TBS “Moon Shot” miniseries (based on a book of the same name by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton) coming out the same year and the HBO miniseries (also involving Hanks) “From the Earth to the Moon” in 1998.

Lovell was a household name at 42 and retired from the career that made him famous days shy of his 45th birthday. He lived another 52 years doing relatively mundane things. Outside of maybe professional sports, it’s hard to think of an occupation with that trajectory.