Jim Lovell

Jim Lovell was born James Arthur Lovell Jr. in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 25, 1928. He was the only child of James Lovell Sr., a furnace salesman born in Toronto, Canada, and Blanche (née Masek), who was of Czech descent. His father died in a car accident in 1933, when Jim was five. He and his mother lived with a relative in Terre Haute, Indiana, for two years before settling in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In Milwaukee he attended Juneau High School, joined the Boy Scouts and reached the rank of Eagle Scout. He was fascinated by rocketry and built flying model rockets as a teenager. He also began dating Marilyn Gerlach while they were both in high school.

After high school Lovell studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1946 to 1948 under the Navy's "Flying Midshipman" programme. He later said the programme gave him a chance at college he could not otherwise have afforded. He played college football, pledged Alpha Phi Omega, and topped up his stipend by washing dishes and busing tables and by looking after the university's lab rats and mice at weekends.

When the Navy began cutting the programme in 1948, he secured a nomination from U.S. Representative John C. Brophy and entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis in July 1948. In his first year he wrote a treatise on the liquid-propellant rocket engine. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1952 and was commissioned an ensign. He later completed Aviation Safety School at the University of Southern California, and in 1958 graduated first in his class at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River.

Lovell was one of 50 members of his 783-strong class picked for naval aviation. He trained at Pensacola, was designated a naval aviator on February 1, 1954, and flew F2H Banshee night fighters with VC-3, deploying to the Western Pacific aboard USS Shangri-La and logging 107 carrier landings. At test pilot school in 1958 his classmates included Wally Schirra and Pete Conrad, who nicknamed him "Shaky". He was among 110 test pilots considered for Project Mercury but was not chosen because of a temporarily high bilirubin count. He then managed the Navy's F-4 Phantom II programme and became a flight instructor and safety officer at Naval Air Station Oceana.

NASA named him to its second astronaut group, the "Next Nine", on September 17, 1962. He flew Gemini 7 with Frank Borman from December 4, 1965, a near two-week endurance flight that also served as the rendezvous target for Gemini 6A. He commanded Gemini 12 from November 11 to 15, 1966, with Buzz Aldrin, the mission that mastered spacewalking techniques for Apollo.

After replacing Michael Collins on the crew, Lovell flew as command module pilot and navigator of Apollo 8 from December 21 to 27, 1968, with Borman and William Anders, the first crewed flight to the Moon. He was backup commander for Apollo 11 and then commanded Apollo 13, launched April 11, 1970, after his crew swapped places with Alan Shepard's. When an oxygen tank failed en route, Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert used the lunar module as a lifeboat, looped around the Moon and returned safely on April 17, 1970. In all he logged 715 hours and 5 minutes in space, a record until Skylab 3 in 1973.

He retired from the Navy and NASA on March 1, 1973. He joined the Bay-Houston Towing Company in Houston, becoming CEO in 1975, was president of Fisk Telephone Systems from 1977, and retired from Centel Corporation in Chicago as an executive vice president on January 1, 1991. He served on the boards of Federal Signal Corporation, Astronautics Corporation of America and Centel.

Lovell married Marilyn Lillie Gerlach on June 6, 1952, at St. Anne's Church in Annapolis. She had transferred from Wisconsin State Teachers College to George Washington University to be near him while he was at the Naval Academy. They had four children: Barbara, James, Susan and Jeffrey. During Apollo 8 he named a lunar feature Mount Marilyn in her honour.

In 1999 the family opened Lovell's of Lake Forest, a restaurant in Lake Forest, Illinois, filled with memorabilia from his NASA years and the filming of Apollo 13. It was sold to his son James ("Jay"), the executive chef, in 2006 and closed in 2015. Marilyn died of natural causes on August 27, 2023, aged 93.

Lovell often spoke about resilience and teamwork. Reflecting on Apollo 13 on NASA's Houston We Have a Podcast in 2020, he said a miracle is something you have to make yourself, or with the people around you. Accepting the University of Wisconsin's Distinguished Alumni Service Award in 1970, he urged the use of words over "rock throwing" to reach political goals. He took part in the Apollo 8 crew's reading from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968, and remained a lifelong supporter of Scouting, chairing the National Eagle Scouts Association.

Lovell was the first person to fly into space four times, one of the first three humans to orbit the Moon, and one of only three people to travel to the Moon twice. Apollo 13 under his command became a lasting example of calm leadership in a crisis, often called NASA's finest hour, and its distance record from Earth stood for 56 years until Artemis II.

A small crater on the far side of the Moon was named Lovell in 1970. Milwaukee's Discovery World was renamed the James Lovell Museum of Science, Economics and Technology, and the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago opened in 2010. He was a life trustee of the Adler Planetarium, which displays many of his personal effects. In April 2026, NASA played a message he recorded before his death to the Artemis II crew on their sixth flight day.

His military and federal honours include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal with gold star, the Distinguished Flying Cross with gold star, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal with star and the French Légion d'honneur (Chevalier).

He won the Harmon International Trophy three times (for 1966, 1967 and 1969), shared the 1968 Robert J. Collier Trophy with the Apollo 8 crew, and with them was named Time magazine's Men of the Year. Other honours include the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal (1969), the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award (1990), the Silver Buffalo Award (1992), the Space Foundation's General James E. Hill Lifetime Space Achievement Award (2003), the NASA Ambassadors of Exploration Award (2009) and the Order of Lincoln (2012). He was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1982 and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1993.

About a month after Apollo 13, Lovell, Haise and Swigert appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He made a cameo in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. With journalist Jeffrey Kluger he wrote Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (1994), which Ron Howard adapted as the 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks as Lovell and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn. Lovell appears in the film as the captain of USS Iwo Jima, shaking Hanks's hand. Tim Daly played him in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and Pablo Schreiber in the 2018 film First Man. He appeared on the covers of Time in 1969 and 1970 and Life in 1970.

NASA's investigation found the most probable cause of the Apollo 13 failure was damaged wiring insulation inside an oxygen tank. Before launch, a problem draining that tank had been reported, and Lovell approved using the tank heaters to purge the oxygen rather than replacing it, which would have delayed the mission by a month. Neither he nor the pad crew knew the tank had the wrong thermostat switch, and the long heater run damaged the insulation.

Jim Lovell died on August 7, 2025, at his home in Lake Forest, Illinois, aged 97. NASA announced his death on August 8 and shared a statement from his family, who described him as a Navy pilot and officer, astronaut, leader and space explorer. Tom Hanks said Lovell was the kind of person "who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own." A cause of death was not made public. He was buried next to his wife Marilyn at the United States Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.