Jim Lovell

His father sold furnaces and died in a car crash in 1933, when Lovell was five. Mother and son spent two years with a relative in Terre Haute and then settled in Milwaukee, where he made Eagle Scout and built flying model rockets. He went to the University of Wisconsin for two years on the Navy's Flying Midshipman program, which he said was the only reason he could afford college at all, and paid the gaps by washing dishes and minding the university's laboratory rats on weekends. When the Navy started cutting the program he got a congressional nomination and entered Annapolis in July 1948, writing a first-year treatise on the liquid-propellant rocket engine. He graduated in 1952 and married Marilyn Gerlach that June.

He flew night fighters off carriers, made 107 carrier landings, and finished top of his test-pilot class at Patuxent River in 1958. That year he was one of 110 candidates for Project Mercury and was cut for a temporarily high bilirubin count. NASA took him in 1962. Gemini 7 kept him and Frank Borman in a two-man cabin for 14 days in 1965 to prove a man could survive a lunar-length flight. On Gemini 12 he commanded while Buzz Aldrin proved spacewalking could be made routine. Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968, the first crew ever to ride a Saturn V and the first to travel to the Moon — ten orbits of the Moon, the Genesis reading on Christmas Eve, and Lovell navigating by sextant. Then Apollo 13.

The thing that saved him he had already rehearsed by mistake. On Apollo 8 he keyed the wrong codes into the guidance computer and wiped part of its memory, and it took him ten minutes to work out the correct values and 15 more to enter them, sighting on Rigel and Sirius. Sixteen months later he did the same job with the platform powered down. The accident itself ran closer to him than the film suggests. A tank had failed to drain properly before launch, and Lovell approved the fix — run the internal heaters for eight hours to boil the oxygen off rather than swap the tank and lose a month. Nobody knew the tank carried the wrong thermostat. The heat stripped the Teflon from the wiring that later sparked.

He left the Navy and NASA on March 1, 1973, ran a towing company, then a telephone company, and retired in 1991. He wrote Lost Moon with Jeffrey Kluger in 1994, and Ron Howard filmed it with Tom Hanks. The screen line is Houston, we have a problem. What Lovell said was that they had had one. Offered a promotion for his film cameo, he said he had retired a captain and a captain he would be. Marilyn died in 2023. He died at home in Lake Forest on August 7, 2025, at 97. On April 6, 2026, NASA played a message he had recorded before his death to the Artemis II crew, on the flight that broke his record.

Jim Lovell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gemini 7 mission
  Fourteen days in orbit with Frank Borman to test a lunar-length flight 1965
• Gemini 12 mission
  He commanded while Buzz Aldrin made spacewalking workable 1966
• Apollo 8 mission
  First crew to reach the Moon — he navigated by sextant and named Mount Marilyn 1968
• Apollo 13 mission
  Commander. The lunar module flew home as a lifeboat 1970
• Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 book
  Written with Jeffrey Kluger and filmed by Ron Howard the next year 1994
• Lovell's of Lake Forest company
  The family restaurant, hung with NASA and film memorabilia, closed in 2015 1999

• July 1948 aged 20 Enters the Naval Academy after the Navy trims its flying program He wrote a first-year treatise on liquid-propellant rocket engines.
• June 6, 1952 aged 24 Marries Marilyn Gerlach at Annapolis They had met in high school in Milwaukee.
• 1958 aged ~30 Passed over for the Mercury Seven because of a blood test A temporarily high bilirubin count. Wally Schirra, his classmate, was selected.
• December 4, 1965 aged 37 Launches on Gemini 7 for 14 days in a two-man cabin
• December 24, 1968 aged 40 Reads from Genesis in lunar orbit on Apollo 8 Coming back around, he radioed: please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.
• April 11, 1970 aged 42 Launches as commander of Apollo 13, bound for Fra Mauro He had swapped flights so Alan Shepard's crew could get more training time.
• April 17, 1970 aged 42 Splashes down alive after four days on lunar module power I am afraid, he said, this is going to be the last lunar mission for a long time.
• 1995 aged ~67 Plays the recovery ship's captain in Ron Howard's Apollo 13 Offered an admiral's part, he declined it.
• August 7, 2025 aged 97 Dies at home in Lake Forest, Illinois, at 97 He had been the oldest living American astronaut since November 2023.

• Fred Haise b. 1933
  Apollo 13 lunar module pilot who helped guide the crippled spacecraft back to Earth. crewmate on Apollo 13
• Buzz Aldrin b. 1930
  Apollo 11 lunar module pilot and second person to walk on the Moon. commanded on Gemini 12
• Alan Shepard 1923–1998
  First American in space and fifth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14. traded flights with
• Deke Slayton 1924–1993
  One of the original Mercury Seven who later directed astronaut selection and flew on the Apollo-Soyuz mission. assigned his crews
• Gene Kranz b. 1933
  NASA flight director who led Mission Control through the Apollo 11 landing and the Apollo 13 rescue. ran the room that brought him home
• Tom Hanks b. 1956
  Academy Award-winning actor known for his everyman roles and status as one of Hollywood's most beloved stars. played him on screen