Jim Lovell reached the Moon twice and never set foot on it
A temporarily high bilirubin reading cost Jim Lovell a place among NASA's first seven astronauts. He applied again, got in, and became the first to make four spaceflights. He circled the Moon on Apollo 8, commanded the crippled Apollo 13 home, and is the only person to reach the Moon twice without landing.
Lovell was born in Cleveland on March 25, 1928. His father, a furnace salesman, died in a car accident when the boy was five, and he grew up with his mother in Terre Haute and then Milwaukee, becoming an Eagle Scout who built model rockets. A Navy scheme paid for two years of engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he also washed dishes and looked after lab mice. When the Navy began trimming that programme he won a place at Annapolis, writing a paper on liquid-fuelled rocket engines in his first year and graduating in 1952.
He was one of just 50 in a class of 783 picked for flight training, flew Banshee night fighters from the carrier USS Shangri-La, and logged 107 carrier landings. In 1958 he topped his test pilot class at Patuxent River, where classmates Wally Schirra and Pete Conrad nicknamed him Shaky. The top graduate usually went to flight test, but because the head of electronics test had complained, Lovell was sent to work on radar.
When NASA opened a public search for a second astronaut group, Lovell learned of it from a magazine advertisement and passed the medical tests this time. He was told on September 14, 1962, and checked into a Houston hotel as Max Peck, its manager's name, to dodge reporters. His speciality in training was recovery systems.
His first flight, Gemini 7 with Frank Borman in 1965, tested whether a crew could last fourteen days in orbit, long enough for any lunar trip. After Gemini 12 in 1966 and Apollo 8 in 1968 came Apollo 13 in 1970, later retold in his 1994 book Lost Moon and the 1995 film based on it. He died in 2025, aged 97.
Source: Jim Lovell
