Former astronaut Jim Lovell knew as a child he wanted to do something with rockets. He had always been fascinated by them, had built a few of his own, and wanted to learn as much as he could. So he wrote a letter to the American Rocket Society, asking how he might get involved.
Their advice was to study.
“I was so interested in rockets and everything, that I thought what I might like to do was be a rocket engineer,” he said. “I didn’t have any money to go to college--- my mother and I lived in a one room apartment in Milwaukee.”
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Lovell did go to college---at the U.S. Naval Academy. He became a Navy pilot. And he fulfilled his dream of doing something with rockets.
He rode four of them into space.
Now, at the age of 90, he still speaks about the wonder of it all.
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“I think I have a rather global view of our existence,” he says. “On Apollo 8, looking at the earth as it really was, 240 thousand miles away, I could put my thumb up to the window and I could completely hide the earth. There were six billion people, and I could put everything I ever knew, behind my thumb!”
“It suddenly gave me a new perspective of life in general!”
Selected in the second group of astronauts in 1962, Lovell flew two missions in Project Gemini. His first, on board Gemini 7, an astonishing 14 days in space.
“The whole purpose was to find out if man could live in a zero gravity environment for two weeks,” he recalled. “That was the maximum time that they thought going to the moon, landing on the moon, and coming home again.”
Lovell closed out the two-man Gemini program with Gemini 12---his spacecraft is on display at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. Then came Apollo 8, and America’s first ever voyage to the moon.
He entered lunar orbit with fellow astronauts Frank Borman and William Anders on Christmas eve. And in an unforgettable broadcast back to Earth, the three read the story of the creation, as the surface of the moon passed below.
It had been a terrible year. Vietnam, assassinations, riots in the streets of cities like Chicago.
“To end up the year by sending three people to go around the moon on Christmas, to read on Christmas Eve the first ten verses of Genesis? You know, you couldn’t do better than that!”
The world agreed. When he returned home, Lovell recalled a telegram which said it all: “You made 1968.”
He still considers Apollo 8 his greatest adventure. Although the world sometimes remembers another one a little more. You know -- the one which started, “Houston, we have a problem.”
It was April of 1970. An oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13, enroute to the moon.
“We really didn’t know what happened,” he remembers. “I was coming down the tunnel and looked at (astronaut) Jack Swigert, and his eyes were as wide as saucers!”
Lovell says he looked at the gauges, and saw life sustaining oxygen dropping to zero.
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“That’s when I looked out the window and saw oxygen escaping, and realized we were in deep deep trouble.”
Through it all, he said he and his fellow crew members had to believe they would return home safely. Indeed, he says he never felt the need to even consider the possibility that a mission might fail.
“If I had to do that, I probably wouldn’t want to go in the first place,” he said. “You’ve got to have faith in what you’re doing.”
Chicagoans can see two of Lovell’s spacecraft. His Apollo 8 command module is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry. And the Gemini 12 capsule is at the Adler Planetarium, which currently is featuring “Letters to Lovell”, where you can offer your personal greetings for his 90th birthday.
Today at 90, Lovell still loves space, and the possibilities it holds. And he still marvels that he got to experience those wondrous first years.
“I look at it this way,” he says. “How could a poor boy from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who couldn’t afford college, end up going to the moon?”
