Jim Lovell, astronaut who commanded Apollo 13, dies at 97

James A. Lovell jnr, the American astronaut who commanded the Apollo 13 spacecraft on its lunar voyage in 1970 and shepherded it on a perilous four-day journey back to Earth after an oxygen tank exploded, has died aged 97. Photo / Bettmann via Getty Images

James A. Lovell jnr, the American astronaut who commanded the Apollo 13 spacecraft on its lunar voyage in 1970 and shepherded it on a perilous four-day journey back to Earth after an oxygen tank exploded, an ordeal that transfixed the world, died August 7 in Lake Forest, Illinois. He was 97.

Nasa announced his death in a statement, which did not cite a cause.

Apollo 13, which became the subject of a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks as Lovell, was one of the US space missions most firmly etched in the public consciousness after John Glenn’s orbit of the Earth in 1962 and the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969.

Those earlier flights were resounding triumphs for the space programme, securing American pre-eminence in the Cold War space race with the Soviets. The legacy of Apollo 13 was more complicated – a terrifying episode that spoke to the skill and level-headedness of the crew trying to stabilise their spacecraft and Mission Control managers back in Houston.

Nasa’s verdict was that it was a “successful failure”, as the space agency gained invaluable experience in crew rescue.

The fate of the Apollo 13 crew - Lovell, Fred W. Haise jnr and John L. Swigert jnr – captivated millions. Lovell’s years as a Navy test pilot before joining the astronaut corps in 1962 proved invaluable in reversing their desperate situation. But after the heady moments, hours and days immediately after their splashdown in the Indian Ocean, he said, “Nasa just wanted to forget it and move on”.

We are saddened by the passing of Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13 and a four-time spaceflight veteran.

Lovell's life and work inspired millions. His courage under pressure helped forge our path to the Moon and beyond—a journey that continues today. https://t.co/AjT8qmxsZI pic.twitter.com/jBlxzgrmSk

— NASA (@NASA) August 8, 2025

Lovell had participated in three earlier missions, notably on the 1968 voyage aboard the Apollo 8 mission – the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the moon and return safely to Earth. This flight paved the way for Apollo 11 the next year, commanded by Neil Armstrong.

Apollo 13, which took off on April 11, 1970, was meant to be Nasa’s third lunar landing, a mission that entailed visiting a new landing site and retrieving rock samples. Nine years had passed since President John F. Kennedy declared it a national priority to land an American on the moon and safely return him, and much of the general public already perceived spaceflight as mundane. Viewer drop-off was precipitous.

Two days into the flight, Lovell and his crewmates conducted a cheery video tour of life in zero gravity that next to no one watched. The networks declined to show the event live.

“Even the controllers in Mission Control were waiting for us to stop the program because they wanted to get back to the ballgame,” Lovell later joked.

Minutes later, a single, thunderous bang rippled through Apollo 13. At first Lovell thought the noise – which was similar to several harmless sounds heard routinely on the craft – was the result of a prank by Haise. But he turned and saw surprise in the other man’s eyes.

“That’s when the ol’ lead weight went down to the bottom of my stomach,” he once told an interviewer, “and I thought that we were really in deep trouble.”

Three of the crew members of Apollo 13 (left to right), Fred Haise, Jim Lovell, and Ken Mattingly. Because of a cold, Mattingly could not go on the mission, which narrowly avoided tragedy when its spacecraft malfunctioned and had to return to Earth without landing on the Moon, with no margin for error. Photo / Bettmann via Getty Images

That unease prompted one of the most harrowing moments in spaceflight history, and surely one of its greatest understatements. Over the radio, Swigert, the command module pilot, initially relayed to Mission Control, “I believe we’ve had a problem here.”

“This is Houston,” came the reply. “Say again, please.”

Lovell then said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

The line was slightly misquoted in the film Apollo 13, based on Lovell’s memoir Lost Moon. But the film is otherwise true to the events of the stunted mission.

The explosion, which an investigation later revealed to be the result of a damaged oxygen tank, cost the vessel two of its three fuel cells, the spacecraft’s only source of electricity. The oxygen tank responsible for the explosion was completely emptied, and Lovell could only watch as his crew’s precious air – the contents of the second and final tank – spewed out into space.

The crew, stranded 240,000 miles away from Earth, was going to run out of oxygen while their momentum kept them hurtling into space. Their fuel cells would cease to function, plunging them into frigid darkness.

With plans for the lunar landing quickly abandoned, Nasa directed the crew to switch off the ship’s damaged service module and turn the lunar lander, which had its own air supply, into a jury-rigged lifeboat. The three men crowded into a spacecraft meant to carry two and settled in for a 90-hour flight – twice as long as the Aquarius Lunar Module was built to operate.

Even with barely enough resources to ration their way through a slingshot around the moon and a journey home, there was the problem of trajectory: the ship was now on course to miss Earth by thousands of miles.

Jim Lovell pictured in 2020 at the Living Legends of Aviation Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Photo / Getty Images

Using only the Earth in the window as an indication of their position – the computer systems had all been turned off to conserve the ship’s scant electricity for re-entry - Lovell had to steer the ship back into place for a trajectory back to Earth.

The task was made onerous by the ship’s newfound centre of gravity: Aquarius was only meant to be piloted once it had disconnected from the bulky command and service modules. When Lovell pushed the controls, they didn’t move the ship in the direction his training had instilled in his muscle memory.

“We were really flying by the seat of our pants,” he said during an interview for Apollo 13: Nasa Mission Reports, published in 2010. “I literally had to learn to fly all over again.”

“We’ve got it!” he said at the moment he confirmed their position, pumping his fist in the air in a moment of exuberance that contrasted with Nasa’s usual deadpan style of communication. “If we raised our voices,” he immediately added to Mission Control, “I submit it was justified.”

The mission was plagued with a host of other problems. Engineers on the ground had to design a way to fit a square air filter into a round hole as the crew grew hypoxic and disoriented because of rising concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Then the crew endured four days of dehydration, sleep deprivation and near-freezing temperatures so demoralising that they ripped the heart rate sensors from their bodies in defiance of Nasa’s medical team. But Lovell’s expert piloting at that critical moment turned an impossible mission into one that was merely improbable.

“He said, ‘My feeling was that it was like playing a game of solitaire,’ ” said science and technology journalist Jeffrey Kluger, who co-wrote Lost Moon (1994) and became a science and technology editor at Time magazine. “As long as you have one more card to turn over on the way home, you’re alive. He told me that his whole goal was to just keep turning cards over until he got them home.”

In one interview, Lovell speculated that he and the crew might have eventually taken their own lives had the ship careened into an endless orbit around the sun. He said they would have waited, however, until they had sent data home. “We probably would have been farther out than anybody,” he mused.

Even once Apollo 13 was on a course back to Earth, the mission was far from routine. In the hours before splashdown, the crew had to move back into Odyssey, the ship’s command module, and turn on computers that had been covered in icy condensation for days. When the systems powered back up without shorting out, the men jettisoned their lander lifeboat and prepared for re-entry.

Then there was the question of the heat shield: Mission Control couldn’t be sure what shape it was in after the explosion, leaving the possibility of a tragic disintegration during the final leg of Apollo 13’s journey.

On April 17, as Earth’s gravity dragged the crew down into the atmosphere, they treated it as a normal landing. After a communication blackout that lasted a chilling minute and a half longer than expected, they splashed down safely in the Indian Ocean. The crew shook hands in silence and waited for their rescue crew to arrive, filling the frigid capsule with balmy South Pacific air.

Soon after, President Richard M. Nixon flew to Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, and conferred on the astronauts the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour.

Apollo 13 may have become a saga of mythological proportions in the American consciousness, but it never held that quality for Lovell, who was simply grateful to have made it home. “We do not realise what we have on Earth until we leave it,” he said soon after landing.

James Arthur Lovell Jr. was born in Cleveland on March 25, 1928, and spent most of his youth in Milwaukee. He was an only child, raised by his mother after his father died in a car crash in 1933.

A precocious science student, he was 16 when he built his first rocket – a cardboard tube loaded with gunpowder and model airplane glue for fuel. It flew 80 feet in the air.

After initially being rejected by the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, he attended the University of Wisconsin for two years. He then applied again to the service school at his mother’s urging and was accepted. In 1952, three hours after his graduation, he married his high school sweetheart, Marilyn Gerlach. They had four children.

His wife died in 2023. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

The Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 prompted the space race and the creation of Nasa. Lovell, who had logged thousands of flight hours as a naval pilot and served as a flight instructor and safety officer, was passed over during his first attempt to join the programme. Nasa issued another call for prospective astronauts in 1962, and Lovell was one of nine selected.

In 1965, he flew a two-week mission on the Gemini 7 spacecraft as a test of survival in zero-gravity for an extended period. He retired from Nasa and the Navy in 1973, at the rank of captain, following a brief stint as deputy director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

He told friends that returning to family life put his orbital exploits into perspective: when he got home, he still had a mortgage to pay and kids to put through college. He spent years in the telecommunications industry, retiring as executive vice president of Centel Corp. in 1991. For many years, he also ran a restaurant near Chicago.

Lovell’s legacy in the public’s mind may have been defined by his actions aboard Apollo 13, but he frequently said that he considered Apollo 8, where he helped pilot the first crewed mission to orbit the moon, to be the highlight of his Nasa career.

Apollo 8 was originally envisioned as an orbital trip around the Earth, but rumours that Soviets were preparing for a moon orbit prompted Nasa to retool the mission. With the derring-do of a test pilot, Lovell steered a spacecraft meant to circle the Earth across the dark side of the moon.

In a decisive moment, he helped spot a scene that would become the iconic photograph known as “Earthrise”, documenting the moment they became the first humans to see Earth peek into view over the moon’s barren surface.