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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Naval officer and Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell dies at 97
Navy Captain and NASA astronaut Jim Lovell is perhaps best known for uttering some of the most infamous words in the history of space travel: 'Houston, we have a problem.' In addition to Apollo 13, the naval aviator flew on three other NASA spacecraft missions. NASA announced Lovell's passing on August 7, 2025, at the age of 97. Growing up, Lovell developed an interest in rocketry and built flying models. Through the Navy's Flying Midshipman program, he studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin between 1946 and 1948. When cutbacks were made to the program, Lovell applied to the U.S. Naval Academy and was admitted through the nomination of Wisconsin Congressman John Brophy. He graduated from Annapolis in 1952 and married his high school sweetheart, Marilyn, that same year. Lovell attended flight training at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, and earned his Wings of Gold in February 1954. He was assigned to Fleet Composite Squadron 3 (VC-3) in California, flying McDonnell Banshee night fighters from the USS Shangri-La. After his deployment, Lovell provided pilot transition training for the FJ-4 Fury, F3H Demon, and F8U Crusader fighter aircraft. In January 1958, Lovell attended test pilot school at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland. In his class with fellow future astronauts Wally Schirra and Pete Conrad. Although he was the top graduate of the class, Lovell was assigned to radar tests instead of flight tests in an effort to spread talent across the Navy. Lovell was selected as an astronaut candidate for Project Mercury later in 1958, but didn't make the cut. The Weapons Systems Test Division at Patuxent River was established in 1960 through the consolidation of the Armament Test and Electronics Test divisions at Patuxent River 1960, and that was when Lovell became the program manager for the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II. The next year, he reported to Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia, to serve as a flight instructor and safety engineering officer. In 1962, Lovell was selected as part of the second group of NASA astronauts, known as the 'Next Nine.' The Next Nine trained to fly on the Gemini and, ultimately, Apollo missions. In 1965, Lovell made his first spaceflight on Gemini VII and was part of the first rendezvous of two manned maneuverable spacecraft. The next year, Lovell made his second spaceflight on Gemini XII. In 1968, Lovell flew aboard Apollo 8, the first spaceflight to leave the influence of Earth's gravity, the first to use the Saturn V rocket, and the first to travel to the Moon. On Christmas Eve 1968, Lovell and his two crewmates read from the Book of Genesis during their broadcast back to Earth. The spacecraft lost contact with Earth when it orbited the far side of the Moon. When contact was reestablished, Lovell radioed, 'Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.' Unfortunately, this cheery Christmas transmission is not the one for which Lovell is known. Lovell's most famous transmission is from the 1970 Apollo 13 mission, and is actually often misquoted. What he radioed from the damaged spacecraft was, 'Houston, we've had a problem.' The harrowing story of Lovell and his crew is immortalized in the 1995 Ron Howard film 'Apollo 13.' The problem aboard Apollo 13 happened during a routine liquid oxygen tank stir, when a fire started in one of the tanks. With oxygen bleeding from the command and service Module Odyssey, Lovell and his men used the Apollo Lunar Module as a space lifeboat for power, oxygen, and propulsion. With the help of NASA engineers and astronauts on Earth, the crew calculated a return trajectory that was achieved through precisely timed engine burns and manual thruster adjustments. Six days after lifting off from Florida, Apollo 13 splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean on April 17, 1970. Lovell is one of only three men to have traveled to the Moon twice, and the only one who has not set foot on it. Between his Gemini and Apollo missions, Lovell racked up an incredible 715 hours and five minutes in space, a record that stood until Skylab 3 in 1973. After retiring from the Navy and NASA, Lovell served as the CEO of the Bay-Houston Towing Company and President of Fisk Telephone Systems. His last job was executive vice president of the Centel Corporation in Chicago, Illinois, before he retired in 1991. Marilyn died in 2023 at the age of 93. After Frank Borman's death that same year, Lovell became the oldest living astronaut. His own death leaves 91-year-old Fred Haise as the last surviving crew member of Apollo 13. Lovell made 107 carrier deck landings and earned the Navy Distinguished Service Medal with gold star, Distinguished Flying Cross with gold star, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Congressional Space Medal of Honor, NASA Distinguished Service Medal, and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal with star. Navy Wars 12 surprising facts about the War of 1812 By Blake Stilwell Aviation The Navy is spending $1.1 billion on the most successful air-to-air missile in the world The Navy is spending $1.1 billion on the most successful air-to-air missile in the world By Miguel Ortiz Navy The Secretary of Defense wants to change a ship's name. Here are the untold perils of renaming a vessel The Secretary of Defense wants to change a ship's name. 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9 News
11 hours ago
- Science
- 9 News
Thousands of dollars' worth of Labubu dolls stolen in California
Famed astronaut of the Apollo 13 mission has died, aged 97 When Jim Lovell was sent to land on the lunar surface, the commander held it together, as his spacecraft was breaking apart.
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tom Hanks honours Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell: ‘Godspeed you, on this next voyage'
Tom Hanks has paid tribute to James 'Jim' Lovell, the Nasa astronaut he famously portrayed in the 1995 film Apollo 13, following his death at the age of 97. Lovell, best known for delivering the infamous 'Houston, we've had a problem' line during the ill-fated 1970 Apollo 13 mission, passed away Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois. On Friday, Hanks shared a message on Instagram honouring Lovell's legacy. The Oscar-winning actor wrote: 'There are people who dare, who dream and who lead others to the places we would not go on our own. Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy.' Hanks continued: 'His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive – and who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages.' The 69-year-old concluded his note by adding: 'On this night of a full moon, he passes on – to the heavens, to the cosmos, to the stars. Godspeed you, on this next voyage, Jim Lovell.' Ron Howard, who directed Hanks in the film adaptation of the failed space mission, also honoured Lovell's memory. In his own Instagram post, Howard said: 'Rest in peace, Commander Lovell. Navy test pilot, Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and, of course, Apollo 13. Simply knowing Jim has been a tremendous honour. 'His combination of intellect, courage and commitment to duty made him one of the most remarkable individuals I've ever met. His support of our movie-making efforts inspired authenticity and elevated our process in so many ways. Thank you, sir, for your service to our country and to humankind.' 'Lovell's life and work inspired millions,' Nasa said in a statement on Friday (August 8). 'His courage under pressure helped forge our path to the Moon and beyond – a journey that continues today.' The Apollo 13 mission was meant to be Nasa's third Moon landing, but it quickly turned into a tense rescue mission after an oxygen tank explosion damaged the spacecraft. Lovell and his crew, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, worked closely with Nasa's mission control to safely return to Earth, demonstrating extraordinary calm and leadership under pressure. The failed mission had a lasting impact on Lovell, who, according to the Associated Press, said in 1999, 'I don't worry about crises any longer.' Whenever he had a problem, he was reported to have said: 'I could have been gone back in 1970. I'm still here. I'm still breathing.' After retiring from Nasa and the Navy in 1973, Lovell transitioned to a successful business career and co-authored the book Lost Moon, which detailed the Apollo 13 mission and inspired the movie adaptation. The Apollo 13 movie, which also starred Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris, was a huge success, earning more than $300m at the global box office. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning the gongs for Best Sound and Best Film Editing.
The Guardian
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tom Hanks pays tribute to Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell
Late Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell has received a tribute from Tom Hanks, the actor who brought him to life in an Oscar-winning movie and said he had gone places most wouldn't dare. 'There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own,' Hanks said of Lovell in a heartfelt Instagram tribute post published after the astronaut's death was announced Friday. 'Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy.' Hanks portrayed Lovell in the 1995 film Apollo 13. Directed by Ron Howard and earning Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound, the film depicted the failed lunar mission that nearly cost Lovell and his crew their lives in 1970. Apollo 13 was intended to be Nasa's third crewed moon landing. But during the US space agency's mission, manned by Lovell and fellow astronauts John Swigert and Fred Haise, an oxygen tank in the service module exploded roughly 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) from Earth. Lovell famously informed mission control, 'Houston, we've had a problem.' Hanks later immortalized the line in the film, which slightly altered the phrase to, 'Houston, we have a problem.' With their power and life-support systems crippled, the crew was forced to abandon their lunar landing and use several engine burns to slingshot around the far side of the moon, setting a course back to Earth. About three days after the explosion, they splashed down safely in the South Pacific, concluding what became known as the Apollo program's 'successful failure'. 'His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive,' Hanks wrote on Friday of Lovell. 'And who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages.' 'On this night of a full Moon, he passes on – to the heavens, to the cosmos, to the stars. God speed you, on this next voyage, Jim Lovell,' reads the end of the tribute. Lovell died on Thursday at age 97 in Lake Forest, Illinois, Nasa said. The cause of death was not immediately released. He made a brief cameo in Apollo 13 as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the Navy ship that recovered the crew after splashdown. The film was nominated for a total of nine Oscars, including best picture. Hanks starred in Apollo 13 alongside actors Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan and the late Bill Paxton.
The Guardian
17 hours ago
- Science
- The Guardian
Jim Lovell obituary
Just after 9.20pm, Houston time, on Monday 13 April 1970, Jim Lovell, who has died aged 97, looked out of the left side window of Odyssey, the command module of the Apollo 13 lunar mission. Caught in the sunlight was what looked like smoke, which Lovell believed, correctly, was oxygen. It was pouring out of the service module, the technological core of the spacecraft. Lovell and his fellow crew members, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, were 205,000 miles from Earth. Thirteen minutes earlier, a muffled explosion had rocked Apollo 13 and Lovell now realised that 'we were in serious trouble' and, unlike Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, or Apollo 12's Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, he would never fulfil his life's ambition to walk on the moon. Indeed the issue for Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, had now become whether he and the other two astronauts would even walk on Earth again. The catastrophe – the culmination of a series of earlier technological and maintenance errors on Earth – risked turning the Odyssey into Nasa's mausoleum, destined to orbit moon and Earth indefinitely, with its three astronauts inside. Almost nine months had elapsed since Apollo 11 and Armstrong's 'giant leap for mankind'. Apollo 12 had followed in November 1969. By the time Apollo 13 took off, media space fatigue had set in. At 9pm on that fateful Monday the astronauts had completed a live broadcast to Earth – which went largely unwatched. Given the choice between Lovell and co and the Doris Day Show, CBS had opted for Doris, and neither NBC nor ABC had carried the transmission. Apollo 13 was approaching its target in the moon highland area of Fra Mauro. There, Lovell and Haise were set to board the lunar module, Aquarius, and land on the moon, leaving Swigert orbiting on the Odyssey. But when Swigert flicked a switch for a routine 'cryo-stir' of the liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks in the service module that provided the spacecraft with air, water and electricity, a short circuit led to a fire, which led to an explosion in oxygen tank two – and tank one was leaking. At 9.08pm Swigert uttered the words that, with a change of tense – made for the 1995 film Apollo 13 – went into history: 'OK Houston, we've had a problem', a phrase echoed seconds later by Lovell. Neither mission control nor the crew could initially work out what that problem was. Intense debate ensued, in space and in Houston. The 20-mile cloud of gas and detritus could be seen from Earth. What followed was an extraordinary display of heroism and ingenuity. In a fraught operation the command module was shut down, conserving its internal batteries (and hence power for re-entry to Earth's atmosphere) and by the end of that day Lovell and his comrades had moved into their 'lifeboat', the lunar module, with minimal power and water. The craft then looped around the moon and, early the following morning, fired the lunar module's descent engine to alter the trajectory. Passing around the moon, the astronauts reached the greatest distance from the Earth ever achieved by human beings, 248,655 miles (more than 400,000km). Lovell later realigned the craft and fired the descent engine to target the south-west Pacific recovery area. Odyssey – used as a 'bedroom' by the crew – was no warmer than a refrigerator. The interior of Aquarius, meanwhile, was covered in condensation, 'three men cold as frogs in a frozen pond' was Lovell's description. All three men became dehydrated, and Haise contracted a kidney infection. Aquarius, designed to carry two men for two days, had to carry three, for four. On the Wednesday, in a piece of masterly improvisation devised between Houston and Apollo 13, the astronauts constructed a purifier to cut potentially lethal carbon dioxide levels. Later that day Lovell honed the trajectory to ensure the craft hit the middle of the 10-mile-wide entry corridor into the Earth's atmosphere – the alternatives were death in orbit or burn-up. Exhausted and severely dehydrated, Lovell repeated the operation early on the Friday morning of touchdown. At 7.14am the service module was jettisoned. At 10.43am, with the lunar module Aquarius evacuated and the crew back on Odyssey, Aquarius was jettisoned. At 12.07pm Odyssey splashed into the Pacific, 6.4km from the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima – from whose decks wafted the strains of Aquarius, a song from the musical Hair, played by the ship's band. 'As long as we were still breathing and had methods to figure out solutions to our predicament,' Lovell recalled a quarter of a century later, 'we kept going.' Lovell was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Blanche (nee Masek), and James Lovell. His father, a coal furnace salesman, was killed in a car accident when Jim was five, and he and his mother moved to Milwaukee. The boy was fascinated by rocketry, and by the pioneers of the interwar and wartime period. As a teenager at Juneau high school in Milwaukee he built – and launched – his own rocket. His uncle had been a first world war naval flier and, while in his senior school year, Lovell applied to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland – but was turned down. Money was tight, so he applied for, and was accepted on, the navy's Holloway plan, which gave him two years of a free engineering course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, plus flight training, sea duty and a commission. After two years it also led a senior officer to suggest to Lovell that he should renew his application to Annapolis. He was accepted, wrote his thesis on liquid fuelled rocketry, graduated in 1952, and soon afterwards married his childhood sweetheart, Marilyn Gerlach. After serving on the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La he spent four years as a test pilot at what was then the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent, Maryland, managing the McDonnell Douglas F4H Phantom jet fighter programme. He was also safety officer with Fighter Squadron 101 in Oceana, Virginia. Lovell applied for, and was turned down, by Nasa, for its Mercury programme, which, between 1962 and 1963, focused on getting astronauts into orbit. This was the height of the space race; the Soviet Union had been first into space with the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and in 1961 sent Yuri Gagarin up as the first person to orbit the Earth. In 1962 Lovell was accepted for the Gemini programme, which developed lunar flight technology and demonstrated, for those who were watching, that the Soviet venture, though big on rocket muscle, lagged in space science. Lovell's first flight was piloting Gemini 7, with Frank Borman, in 1965 on a record-breaking 14-day Earth orbit that included a rendezvous with Gemini 6. The following year he commanded Gemini 12 on the last Gemini mission. The first manned lunar mission, Apollo 8, at Christmas 1968, brought Lovell, together with Borman and William Anders, to global attention. It also raised morale in a year that had seen the Vietnamese Tet offensive, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, and urban uprisings across the US. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times. Lovell and his colleagues read from Genesis to the 'good Earth' on Christmas Eve, were made Time magazine's men of the year, and their pictures appeared on stamps. That flight, the Guardian's Anthony Tucker reported at the time, had 'been as near to perfection as the most optimistic could have dreamed'. Then, for Lovell, came the flight of Apollo 13, which, after the initial media indifference, turned into a global event because of the drama involved. By the time he embarked on the mission, he had already spent a record-breaking 572 hours in space; his eventual tally, 715 hours and five minutes, was not exceeded until after the advent of the Skylab space station in 1973. Apollo 13 was, however, the end of Lovell's space career. Less than three years later he left Nasa and went into business in Houston. 'Our mission was a failure but I like to think it was a successful failure,' he said, and indeed, as a triumph over adversity, it was. It also ended the era that had begun with President John F Kennedy's declaration in 1961 that by the end of the decade the US should land a man on the moon and return him 'safely to the Earth'. Armstrong and Aldrin had fulfilled that pledge, but Lovell's adventure reminded Americans of the cost of the lunar programme and it posed the question, with the Soviet Union long out of the race, of what it had all been for. There were four more Apollo landings, but, as Gerard DeGroot wrote in Dark Side of the Moon (2007): 'Of all the lunar missions, probably 99% of Americans can recall only two: Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 – the first one and the nearly disastrous third one. The others have faded into obscurity and insignificance.' For years Nasa seemed reluctant to talk about Apollo 13, which irritated Lovell, who never lost his dream of walking on the moon. He was, another astronaut was reputed to have said, 'the Captain Ahab of outer space'. It took Ron Howard's film – Lovell liked Tom Hanks's portrayal of him, although he thought Kevin Costner would have been a better lookalike – to elevate Lovell and his comrades, justly, to the American pantheon. Lovell co-wrote the book, Lost Moon (1994), on which the movie was based, and had a fleeting on-screen role – greeting Hanks on the Iwo Jima – at the end of the film. Much earlier he made an appearance in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring David Bowie. Lovell's wife, Marilyn, died in 2023. He is survived by their children, Barbara, James, Susan and Jeffrey, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. James Arthur Lovell, astronaut, test pilot and businessman, born 25 March 1928; died 7 August 2025
