Apollo 13 Commander James (Jim) Lovell died at the age of 97 in Lake Forest, Illinois, on August 7. Lovell is best known for his heroic efforts, successfully leading his crew safely back to earth after an oxygen tank explosion in space.
Even before the Apollo 13 mission, Captain James A. Lovell, Jr., USN (RET.) had an impressive career as an astronaut. He participated in the Gemini 7 and 12 missions in the mid 1960s, and in 1968 he was the command module pilot in the Apollo 8 mission. This mission left earth on December 21 and was the first to orbit the moon and return home safely. In fact, the crew circled the moon 10 times.
On December 24, there was an extraordinary broadcast – approximately one billion people listened in. On Christmas Eve, the astronauts took turns reading from Genesis on their ninth circuit around the moon.
The Bible’s words that Lovell read seem particularly relevant looking back on the life of an astronaut now fully departed from earthly life:
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Besides this very public pronouncement of Scripture, Lovell didn’t speak often about his faith, but was a life-long Christian. Yet, the forays into space could not help but inspire reflections on the heavens.
Indeed, on April 15, 1970, when the world waited to hear whether the Apollo 13 mission would make it home after such a catastrophic issue, Pope Paul VI acknowledged the tremendous efforts of those in astronaut missions saying that the
“exploration of the boundless depths of the universe … can and must be the conquest of a broader horizon, more favorable to the flights of the spirit, which, in such a trial, discovers itself both lowly and sovereign, and thus is all the more urged to make the metaphysical leap from the experimental plane to that even more real — yet always mysterious — realm of the transcendent presence of God.”
Lovell is certainly most famous for the words he transmitted to NASA during the Apollo 13 mission, “Houston, we've had a problem.”
However, it is also significant that he spoke about humanity’s place in the universe, stating “The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.” In speaking about the Moon, he said, “We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth — its beauty, its fragility.”
Captain Lovell will be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy and is survived by one of his Apollo 13 crew mates as well as his four children and many grandchildren and great grandchildren.
