James Arthur Lovell Jr. ( ; born March 25, 1928) is an American retired astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot and mechanical engineer. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he became, with Frank Borman and William Anders, one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon. He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, circled the Moon and returned safely to Earth.
A graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in the class of 1952, Lovell flew F2H Banshee night fighters. This included a Western Pacific deployment aboard the aircraft carrier . In January 1958, he entered a six-month test pilot training course at the Naval Air Test Center at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, with Class 20 and graduated at the top of the class. He was then assigned to Electronics Test, working with radar, and in 1960 he became the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II program manager. The following year he became a flight instructor and safety engineering officer at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and completed Aviation Safety School at the University of Southern California.
Lovell was not selected by NASA as one of the Mercury Seven astronauts due to a temporarily high bilirubin count. He was accepted in September 1962 as one of the second group of astronauts needed for the Gemini and Apollo programs. Prior to Apollo, Lovell flew in space on two Gemini missions, Gemini 7 (with Borman) in 1965 and Gemini 12 in 1966. He was the first person to fly into space four times. One of 24 people to have flown to the Moon, Lovell was the first to fly to it twice. He is a recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He co-authored the 1994 book Lost Moon, on which the 1995 film Apollo 13 was based. Lovell was featured in a cameo appearance in the film.
Early life
James Arthur Lovell Jr. was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 25, 1928, the only child of James Lovell Sr., a Toronto, Ontario, Canada-born coal furnace salesman who died in a car accident in 1933 and Blanche née Masek, who was of Czech descent. For the first two years after the death of his father, Lovell and his mother lived with a relative in Terre Haute, Indiana. They then relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he went to Juneau High School. He was a member of the Boy Scouts during his childhood and eventually achieved Eagle Scout, the organization's highest rank. He became interested in rocketry and built flying models as a teenager.
After graduating from high school, Lovell attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison for two years, where he studied engineering under the United States Navy's "Flying Midshipman" program from 1946 to 1948. At Wisconsin, he played college football and pledged to the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity. While Lovell was attending pre-flight training in the summer of 1948, the Navy was beginning to make cutbacks in the program, and cadets were under a great deal of pressure to transfer out. There were concerns that some or most of the students who graduated as naval aviators would not have pilot billets to fill. To avoid this prospect, Lovell decided to apply to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He secured a nomination from his local U.S. Representative, John C. Brophy, and entered Annapolis in July 1948.
During his first year, Lovell wrote a treatise on the liquid-propellant rocket engine. He graduated in the spring of 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree and was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy. On June 6, he married Marilyn Lillie Gerlach in a ceremony at St. Anne's Church in Annapolis. The two had begun dating while they were in high school. As a college student, Gerlach had transferred from Wisconsin State Teachers College to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., so she could be near him while he was at Annapolis. They had four children: Barbara, James, Susan, and Jeffrey.