Jim Lovell Reaches Eternity

It’s probably just the Romantic in me that imagines that it was where he always wanted to be.

A more prosaic explanation of his career was that, like many boys fascinated by explosions and fireworks, he extended that into being fascinated with rockets and was talented enough, smart enough and dedicated enough to turn that into a joyous career. And perhaps lucky enough, in terms of being in the right place at the right time. Another astronaut once said that if Lovell fell off a boat into a lake he’d emerge with a fish in his pocket!

I imagine that was said before the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission?

Jim and Marilyn Lovell aboard the
U.S. Navy sailboat Freedom in 1950

Robert Zimmerman was not being disrespectful the other day when he titled his obituary, Jim Lovell, the world’s first space cadet, for he grew to know Lovell well in writing the story of the Apollo 8 mission, Genesis, whose book cover is featured above and which I strongly recommend, even if you may have read about it before in books like Andrew Chaikin‘s wonderful 1994 piece, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts.

Zimmerman explains the background to that crack:

“One of a kind” is an understatement. Lovell was not only passionate about going to space, he was passionate and committed to doing so long before anyone else. As a kid in the 1940s he already dreamed of space adventures, building homemade rockets. As a teenager he wrote the American Rocket Society, asking for advice about becoming a rocket engineer. Later in college he wrote a paper entitled “The Development of the Liquid-Fuel Rocket.”

For most of the astronauts rockets and spacecraft were just more machines to master and fly, but even though he was just as professional in the dangerous world of being a US military test pilot in the 1950’s and 1960’s, rockets and spacecraft represented to Lovell something much more, the enabling of Man to reach the heavens and other worlds. If there had been missions to Mars in the 1970’s and 80’s he’d have been on them.

Every time I spoke to him I was always impressed by his passion for space. For him, it represented hope and the future. It also acted to make him humble. As he looked back at the Earth as they were heading home on Apollo 8, he couldn’t help noting, “The Earth looks pretty small right from here.”

Lovell had the courage to push the limits of human exploration, even though he knew he would be doing it in a tiny and very fragile spacecraft using technology that humans had barely yet invented. May we all have the courage and vision as he did to make his life achievement merely the first chapter in the human effort to explore and settle the solar system.

So much did he love the business of space exploration that by 1970 he’d racked up more time doing it than any other astronaut: 715 hours (almost a month), a record that would not be broken until the Skylab missions in 1973-74:

• Gemini 7 for 14 days with Frank Borman, proving humans could survive in zero-G long enough to get to the Moon and back. The cabin was the size of the front seat of a Volkswagen.
  
• Gemini 12, which he commanded, with four more days in space, completing a rendezvous and two dockings with an Agena target stage, both flown manually by him, and also with the vital task hof spacewalking finally accomplished by Buzz Aldrin.
  
• Apollo 8, with Frank Borman again as commander. Six days this time as they reached and then orbited the Moon. I covered part of the story a couple of years ago in The Good Earth, which I wrote just after Borman’s death. The third crewman, Bill Anders, died last year while flying his stunt plane, so now they’re all gone. The mission was incredibly audacious, literally a leap far beyond the only other Apollo mission that had been flown, Apollo 7 in earth orbit. Apollo 8 had to fly without a lunar module, which was judged an acceptable risk by NASA and the men themselves.
  
• Apollo 13, which made clear the risks Apollo 8 had taken when the Lunar Module – call sign Aquarius – was what got the men home; without it they’d have been dead. I wrote about the mission on its 50th anniversary in 2020, and lamented that Lovell, this time the commander, knew he would likely never get another shot at walking on the Moon. The irony was that he and his crew had been swapped from Apollo 14 to allow that rookie crew (aside from Commander Alan Shepard’s 15 minutes in 1961 for America’s first manned spaceflight) more time to train.
  
  On this flight, Lovell became one of only three men to go to the Moon twice, the other two being Apollo 10 crew, Command Module Pilot (CMP) John Young, who would command Apollo 16, and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Gene Cernan, who would command Apollo 17.

A mark of respect on Wikipedia is that, since his passing on August 7, his Wiki link has been in the No. 1 spot now on their home page since then and at the time of this post.

I think I’ll kick back tonight and watch the great 1995 movie about the mission, Apollo 13.

And perhaps drift off to sleep listening to Brian Eno’s wonderful 1983 album, Apollo, especially this haunting track, Ascent, combined not with film of Apollo leaving the Moon’s surface, but video from the ISS.