Tom Hanks is honoring the real-life hero that he once portrayed in a popular, Oscar-winning film.
After the death of astronaut Jim Lovell was announced on Friday, Hanks shared a poignant social media post to his Instagram, writing, “There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to 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 added in the post.
The actor portrayed Lovell in the 1995 Ron Howard-directed film Apollo 13, which told the story of Lovell’s failed lunar space mission which almost cost him and his crew their lives in 1970.
Apollo 13 would have marked NASA’s third successful crewed moon landing, but during the ill-fated mission – which carried Lovell as well as astronauts John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. on board – an oxygen tank located on the crew’s service module exploded when they were about 322,000 kilometers away from Earth.
Lovell famously delivered the news to mission control, saying “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
The exchange was later immortalized by Hanks in the movie, which costarred Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan and the late Bill Paxton.
With the damage effectively taking out their power source and other life support supplies, the Apollo 13 crew had to abruptly abandon their trek to the lunar surface and use several engine burns to swing around the far side of the moon and put themselves on a course back toward Earth.
The three-person crew made a high-stakes splashdown return in the South Pacific Ocean about three days after the tank explosion, marking the conclusion of what has come to be known as the “successful failure” of the Apollo missions.
“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,” Hanks wrote in his tribute.
Lovell died at age 97 on Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois, according to a NASA news release, CNN previously reported.
“Jim’s character and steadfast courage helped our nation reach the Moon and turned a potential tragedy into a success from which we learned an enormous amount,” NASA said.
“We mourn his passing even as we celebrate his achievements.”
The cause of death was not immediately clear.
He made a brief cameo in the movie as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the Navy ship that recovered the Apollo 13 crew after splashdown.
Apollo 13 was nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture, and won two, for best film editing and best sound.
One of NASA’s most traveled astronauts in the agency’s first decade, Lovell flew four times — Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 — with the two Apollo flights riveting the folks back on Earth.
In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders was the first to leave Earth’s orbit and the first to fly to and circle the moon.
They could not land, but they put the US ahead of the Soviets in the space race. Letter writers told the crew that their stunning pale blue dot photo of Earth from the moon, a world first, and the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis saved America from a tumultuous 1968.
The Apollo 13 mission had a lifelong impact on Lovell
”The thing that I want most people to remember is (that) in some sense it was very much of a success,” Lovell said during a 1994 interview.
”Not that we accomplished anything, but a success in that we demonstrated the capability of (NASA) personnel.”
A retired Navy captain known for his calm demeanor, Lovell told a NASA historian that his brush with death affected him.
“I don’t worry about crises any longer,” he said in 1999. Whenever he has a problem, “I say, ‘I could have been gone back in 1970. I’m still here. I’m still breathing.’ So, I don’t worry about crises.”
Lovell had ice water in his veins like other astronauts, but he didn’t display the swagger some had, just quiet confidence, said Smithsonian Institution historian Roger Launius.
He called Lovell “a very personable, very down-to-earth type of person, who says ‘This is what I do. Yes, there’s risk involved. I measure risk.'”
Lovell spent about 30 days in space across four missions
In all, Lovell flew four space missions — and until the Skylab flights of the mid-1970s, he held the world record for the longest time in space with 715 hours, 4 minutes and 57 seconds.
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“He was a member of really the first generation of American astronauts and went on to inspire multiple generations of Americans to look at the stars and want to explore,” said Bruce McClintock, who leads the RAND Corp. Space Enterprise Initiative.
Aboard Apollo 8, Lovell described the oceans and land masses of Earth.
“What I keep imagining, is if I am some lonely traveler from another planet, what I would think about the Earth at this altitude, whether I think it would be inhabited or not,” he remarked.
That mission may be as important as the historic Apollo 11 moon landing, a flight made possible by Apollo 8, Launius said.
“I think in the history of space flight, I would say that Jim was one of the pillars of the early space flight program,” Gene Kranz, NASA’s legendary flight director, once said.
Lovell was immortalised by Tom Hanks’ portrayal
But if historians consider Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 the most significant of the Apollo missions, it was during Lovell’s last mission that he came to embody for the public the image of the cool, decisive astronaut.
“We knew we were in deep, deep trouble,” he told NASA’s historian.
“There is never a guarantee of success when it comes to space,” McClintock said.
Lovell showed a “leadership role and heroic efforts in the recovery of Apollo 13.”
By coolly solving the problems under the most intense pressure imaginable, the astronauts and the crew on the ground became heroes.
In the process of turning what seemed routine into a life-and-death struggle, the entire flight team had created one of NASA’s finest moments.
“They demonstrated to the world they could handle truly horrific problems and bring them back alive,” said Launius.
He regretted never being able to walk on the moon
The loss of the opportunity to walk on the moon “is my one regret,” Lovell said in a 1995 interview with The Associated Press.
President Bill Clinton agreed when he awarded Lovell the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1995. “While you may have lost the moon … you gained something that is far more important perhaps: the abiding respect and gratitude of the American people,” he said.
Lovell once said that while he was disappointed he never walked on the moon, “The mission itself and the fact that we triumphed over certain catastrophe does give me a deep sense of satisfaction.”
And Lovell clearly understood why this failed mission afforded him far more fame than had Apollo 13 accomplished its goal.
“Going to the moon, if everything works right, it’s like following a cookbook. It’s not that big a deal,” he told the AP in 2004. “If something goes wrong, that’s what separates the men from the boys.”
James A. Lovell was born March 25, 1928, in Cleveland.
He attended the University of Wisconsin before transferring to the US Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland.
On the day he graduated in 1952, he and his wife, Marilyn, were married.
A test pilot at the Navy Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland, Lovell was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1962.
Lovell retired from the Navy and from the space program in 1973, and went into private business.
In 1994, he and Jeff Kluger wrote Lost Moon, the story of the Apollo 13 mission and the basis for the film Apollo 13.
In one of the final scenes, Lovell appeared as a Navy captain, the rank he actually had.
He and his family ran a now-closed restaurant in suburban Chicago, Lovell’s of Lake Forest.
His wife, Marilynn, died in 2023. Survivors include four children.
In a statement, his family hailed him as their “hero.”
“We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humour, and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible,” his family said. “He was truly one of a kind.”
