Remembering 2025’s Losses: Jim Lovell

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Ah, here’s a name that you may not know but, once I tell you his famous line, you’ll know exactly who I’m talking about. One of the heroes of my childhood passed away last year, and it’s time to salute him. Jim Lovell Houston, we’ve had a problem Ah, the (warning) lights are flashing in your head now. Jim Lovell was the commander of Apollo 13. And, let me tell you something, as someone who was a kid during both the first lunar landing AND the miraculous return of the crippled Apollo 13 command module, it was far more exciting when Apollo 13 safely splashed down. The Apollo 13 incident was in April, 1970, less than a year after the first moonwalk. It was also just over three years after the great tragedy of Apollo 1, where three astronauts died during a test exercise on the launching pad. After all of the successes following the 1967 tragedy, we’d seemingly forgotten how dangerous space travel was. Apollo 13 reminded us of that. Unlike the Apollo 1 disaster, which was a flash fire in a pure oxygen environment (the astronauts had no chance of escape), Apollo 13 happened a mile or two (180,000 nautical miles) from the nearest repair shop. It was up to the knowledge of the three astronauts and the people at Mission Control in Houston to get that crippled ship home. And I’ll tell you, there were a lot of people who thought we were going to have our first in-space fatalities. Thank God, we didn’t. Using the lunar landing craft to help (the booster rockets as well as the oxygen supply), Apollo 13 did a “slingshot” maneuver around the moon, using gravity to send it back toward Earth. They splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean on April 17, 1970…the best early birthday present I ever got. That was Jim Lovell’s final space mission. He’d been on three previous missions (Gemini 7, Gemini 12, and Apollo 8) that had been uneventful, so I guess he wasn’t going to push his luck. Back in those days we knew the names of the astronauts. I suppose it was because so many of them were from nearby (there are a lot of astronauts from Ohio and Indiana) that is was a source of regional as well as national pride. Farewell and salute, Captain Lovell. Fair winds and following seas. Jim Lovell Born James Arthur Lovell, Jr., March 25, 1928, Cleveland, Ohio Died August 7, 2025, Lake Forest, Illinois (natural causes) (age 97) HALLS OF FAME: International Space, 1982; U.S. Astronaut, 1993 NASA’s tribute to Captain Lovell: