Remembering Jim Lovell, the Most Down-to-Earth Astronaut

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The safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts after their lunar landing mission encountered technical difficulties, 17th April 1970. From left to right, Lunar Module pilot Fred W. Haise, Mission Commander James A. Lovell and Command Module pilot John L. Swigert Credit - Getty Image
Jim Lovell's job never required him to be a poet. Once the most experienced man in space flight—with two trips in the Gemini program and two lunar missions in Apollo—Lovell, who died August 7 at age 97, went places few others have gone and saw things few others had seen. But that didn't mean there was music when he spoke.
'We're on our way, Frank,' was the best he could muster in 1965 when the engines on his Titan rocket lit and he and Frank Borman took off aboard Gemini 7. 'Boy, boy, boy,' he said, when he and Buzz Aldrin splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of their Gemini 12 mission in 1966. 'Houston, we've had a problem,' he intoned when a sudden explosion crippled his Apollo 13 spacecraft in 1970, reporting the incident as if it were nothing more troubling than the family car running out of windshield washer fluid.
None of this was Lovell's fault. Jack Swigert, Lovell's command module pilot aboard Apollo 13, once said that the very thing that qualified astronauts to embark on such potentially mortal missions as flights to the moon—a cool, engineer's detachment from the scope of the experience and the chances they were taking—disqualified them from adopting the larger, epochal view of things. You could either go to the moon or you could appreciate the going; you couldn't do both.
And yet once, in my experience, Lovell went lyrical. It was 1995, and his and my book about his Apollo 13 mission had just been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard. It was a gobsmacking experience for me. I had spent my career quietly toiling as a science journalist, enjoying some recognition for my work, but nothing remotely like fame. Lovell, on the other hand, knew a thing or two about being celebrated, being feted, being recognized in restaurants and sought out for interviews. And he knew, too, that fame was ephemeral—that the public's attention could be a fickle and flickering thing. You are hailed after your splashdown; you are forgotten the next year. And so Lovell tried to offer me the benefit of his experience, decades after he had retired from the glittery astronaut corps.
'Remember where you're standing when the spotlight goes off,' he told me on the phone one day, 'because no one's going to help you off the stage.'
It was wise; it was wonderful; and I held that counsel close.
Lovell wore his fame lightly—like a loose garment. He was a man of the Earth—a naval officer, a father of four, a homeowner—who just happened to have been to space. Around the time we were finishing our book, he was planning a vacation with his wife, Marilyn, and was at a loss as to where to go.
'I've been to Europe,' he told me. 'I've been to Asia and Australia and the moon and Africa.' The moon made the list, but it wasn't even first.
Lovell took a similarly easy, workmanlike approach to all four of his space missions. His Gemini 7 flight was a long, gritty, lunch-bucket mission, with him and Borman spending 14 days aloft in a spacecraft that afforded them little more habitable volume than two commercial coach seats. There were no spacewalks for Borman and Lovell; no dramatic dockings with the uncrewed Agena target vehicle with which other Gemini crews would practice orbital maneuvering. The men were flying lab rats, sent aloft to determine if human beings could survive in space for the fortnight the longest lunar missions would last.
'It was two weeks in a men's room,' Lovell would tell me.
That mission was enough for Borman. He did not raise his hand for any more Gemini flights and instead went straight into training for the Apollo program, with its spacious capsules and its glamorous trips to the moon. Lovell could not get enough of flying and eleven months later commanded Gemini 12, the final mission of the Gemini series, with Aldrin in the co-pilot's seat. The men walked to their rocket with signs on their backs. Lovell's read THE. Aldrin's read END.
It was in the Apollo program that the workaday Lovell became the iconic Lovell. Space historians debate what the most noteworthy missions of all time are and virtually all of them would put Yuri Gagarin's single orbit of the Earth in 1961—making him the first human being in space—on the list. After that, most would include Apollo 8, Apollo 11—the first moon landing—and Apollo 13. Lovell flew on two of them.
Apollo 8 was a rhapsodic ending to a blood-soaked year. It was 1968, and in January the Tet Offensive in Vietnam began. That was followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the assassination of Robert Kennedy, riots exploding in cities across the country, and the violent clashes between protestors and police at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. But NASA had something fine and bracing and curative planned.
During the summer, the space agency quietly decided that before the year was out it would launch Apollo 8, with Borman, Lovell, and rookie astronaut Bill Anders aboard, into orbit around the moon.While there, the astronauts would broadcast a message home, showing the 3.5 billion people living on the Earth what their planet looked like from space and, more transformatively, what the ancient, tortured surface of the moon looked like crawling beneath the spacecraft's window. There are a lot of things that determine just when a lunar mission will fly—the readiness of the spacecraft, the training of the crew, the availability of naval forces to effectuate recovery, the relative positions of the Earth and the moon when a launch is planned, and more. For Apollo 8 all of those tumblers fell just right and NASA determined that the optimal day for the historic orbit and broadcast home would be Christmas Eve.
When that day arrived, nearly one in every three people on the planet was in front of a television set. Borman, Lovell, and Anders played their parts gracefully—describing what they were seeing and thinking and experiencing.
'The vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe-inspiring,' Lovell said. 'It makes you realize just what you have back on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.'
The moon, Borman added, 'looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone.'
'The horizon here is very, very stark,' said Anders. 'The sky is pitch black and the … moon is very bright. And the contrast between the sky and the moon is a vivid, dark line.'
The astronauts continued their lunar travelogue for a few minutes more and then—befitting the enormity of the experience, befitting the fine and slender thread that at that moment was connecting one species to two worlds, and most important befitting the season—the men concluded their broadcast with the words of Genesis.
'And God called the light day and the darkness He called night,' Lovell said when it was his turn to read. 'And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, 'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters.''
Borman and Anders read from the ancient verse too, and then Borman, as commander, concluded the broadcast. 'And from the crew of Apollo 8,' he said, 'we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.'
Borman, Lovell, and Anders came back to ticker tape parades, an appearance before Congress, a world good-will tour. TIME named them Men of the Year for 1968. A photograph Anders took of the Earth rising above the surface of the moon would be credited with sparking the environmental movement and would be hailed as one of the most important photos ever taken.
Borman and Anders needed no more of space and no more of fame; both men quietly retired from the astronaut corps. History would note that Lovell did not. In April 1970, he was set to fly Apollo 13, a mission that would have been NASA's third moon landing. But history would deny Lovell the opportunity to get his boots dirty when an explosion in an on-board oxygen tank crippled the lunar mothership, making a landing impossible and turning the mission of exploration to one of survival.
Lovell would successfully steer his broken ship home, bringing himself, Swigert, and crewmate Fred Haise back alive. There would be talk—briefly—of giving the man who had twice been to the moon but had never been able to walk on it another chance at yet another mission. But Lovell knew his time in space was up. There were too many other astronauts competing for a seat on the few Apollo missions remaining to let one man fly three times. And Lovell could not—would not—subject Marilyn, whom the exploding oxygen tank had nearly widowed, to yet one more launch, one more mission, one more roll of the mortal dice.
Marilyn is now gone, predeceasing Jim by nearly two years. Jim is now gone too. But they endure. During Apollo 8, Lovell spotted a small, pretty, triangular mountain at the edge of the moon's Sea of Tranquility that he named Mount Marilyn. The other astronauts took up the name and in 2017, the International Astronomical Union, which governs official space nomenclature, broke its rule requiring features or objects named after people to to be named posthumously, and recognized Mount Marilyn. My family sent Marilyn flowers and she sweetly called with her thanks.
Over the years, I enjoyed the hospitality of the Lovells on a handful of occasions, staying in their home in Lake Forest, Illinois—once with my daughters who delighted in Jim's tour of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, where Apollo 8 is on display, and where he leaned close to Anders' earthrise picture with them and explained how it was taken. In one of the rooms in the Lovell home is a small bronzed baby shoe that Lovell the explorer wore when he was just Lovell the baby. I couldn't help thinking how rich and complete it would be to have a bronzed lunar boot next to it. But the foot that wore the baby shoe never did touch the moon.
That fickle spotlight Jim warned me about has now shone its last on him. He has left the stage—and we are left poorer for his absence.
Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [e-mail].
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