James Lovell, Jr.
1928-
Official portait of Jim Lovell, Jr, before the Apollo 13 flight (NASA)
Official NASA portrait for Project Apollo.
    The long and distinguished career of astronaut Jim Lovell helped secure him a seat in history. Starting with Gemini 7 and spanning to the nearly-disastrous Apollo 13 flight, Jim Lovell's life story is a truly fascinating tale.
    Jim Lovell was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1928, but he considers Milwaukee, Wisconsin to be his true hometown. Even at a young age, he had an interest in rocketry (although at that time space travel existed only in the realm of science fiction). He and a friend built a rocket from gunpowder and a postal tube. On its one flight test, it rose about one hundred feet before exploding.
    When he had come of age, Lovell joined the Navy and became a Naval aviator. He and his wife Marilyn eventually ended up at Patuxent River, Maryland, where the Navy tested its hottest new fighters. After the Russians launched Sputnik, Lovell deemed it a natural extension of his career to join the space program. He was rejected for the first astronaut group, but he did join the second group, the "Next Nine". As Mercury was winding down, his group picked up in Gemini, the program that would span the technology gap between Mercury and Apollo.
    His first flight was the Gemini VII mission. He and Frank Borman orbited the Earth fourteen days in the tiny Gemini spacecraft.When the mission had nearly concluded, they were visited by another Gemini, number VI, which rendezvoused and flew in formation for several hours.
    With Buzz Aldrin, Lovell closed out the Gemini program with the triumphant Gemini XII mission. Three days in duration, it achieved all of the final objectives of the program, including a few additional extracurricular activities.
    After the tragic Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo program was set drastically behind schedule. The first manned flight, Apollo 7, was a proving mission for the spacecraft. The next mission, the crew of which Jim Lovell was a part, was supposed to orbit Earth at a high apogee (around 100,000 miles) and test out all of the components of the spacecraft together in flight. But, Grumman's Lunar Module would not be ready yet, so Apollo 8 gained itself a new flight plan: a trip to the moon. Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders orbited the moon ten times on Christmas Eve and Day, before returning back to Earth.
    Jim Lovell's last flight was also the most famous. On the Apollo 13 flight to the moon, an oxygen tank ruptured, venting precious oxygen out into space. The mission turned from a question of how the astronauts would get to the moon to how they would get back home. With John Swigert and Fred Haise, and the constant help of mission control back on Earth, they were able to nurse the injured command module Odyssey back home. All three of the crew survived with no long-term ill effects.
    Today, Jim Lovell focuses most of his energies on public speaking to advance the message of space exploration to the American public and abroad.