Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell dies, aged 97
發佈日期: 2025-08-10 21:32
TVB News
American astronaut James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 who helped turn a failed moon mission into a miracle space rescue story, has died at the age of 97. He died on Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois.
The famous mission was made into a 1995 Hollywood movie, with Tom Hanks playing the role of Lovell.
Jim Lovell never said, "Houston, we have a problem."
The famous line attributed to the NASA astronaut was already embedded in popular lexicon long before it was uttered by actor Tom Hanks, who played Lovell in the 1995 movie "Apollo 13".
His actual line was "Houston, we've had a problem here."
But the sheer drama of his 1970 Apollo 13 mission enraptured Americans and others around the world and is something no one from that time will forget.
It was a triumph of on-the-fly engineering and helped to avoid a disaster as Lovell and his crew helped the stricken spacecraft safely back to Earth.
Lovell and crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise endured cramped conditions, dehydration and hunger for more than three days while mission control in Houston looked for ways to bring them home.
Lovell once said: "Thirteen, not successful in its initial mission, was very successful in binding back together the people of the United States and the world and the space programme as to how people can take almost a complete disaster and turn it into something that's very successful.
One of NASA's most travelled astronauts early on, Lovell flew four times -- Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.
In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders was the first to leave Earth's orbit and the first to fly to and circle the moon, almost a year before Neil Armstrong's historic moon landing.
Apollo 8 could not land, but they put the U.S. ahead of the Soviet Union in the space race.
And they captured these iconic pictures of the Earth rising from behind the moon.
Said Lovell in a different interview: "Apollo 8 flight was perhaps the most dangerous because it was new. We weren't planning to go to the moon that early with just a command service module. We had better plans, more training to do. But when the opportunity came up to go the moon with just a command service module on Apollo 8, they decided to do that with just four months of training."
Neil Armstrong may have taken a giant step for mankind, but it was Lovell whose pioneering mission paved the way.
