Greatest American Hero

In the morning of 17 of April 1970, on the instruction of the priest leading our religious education class at my primary school in Dublin the entire class bowed their heads and prayed for the astronauts of Apollo 13.

Many people around the world were doing the same thing, crowds gathered in New York, Rome and Jerusalem. The entire world was captivated by what was happening just beyond the Earth's atmosphere. At that moment the crew of the ship, crippled by an explosion 3 days earlier, were hurtling towards Earth with no certainty that a safe landing would be possible. A fiery death on re-entry or being marooned in space until they ran out of oxygen was at least as likely.

The captain Jim Lovell - who passed away on 7 August at the ripe age of 97 - put it like this “I’m lookin’ out the window now and that Earth is whistlin’ in like a high-speed freight train”

Earth from Apollo 13 on return journey. Image courtesy NASA

Lovell’s laconic tone in the face of life-threatening situations is better remembered in the iconic and often misquoted phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem”. Nobody hearing that phrase at the time could have guessed that the “problem” was an explosion which blew the side off the service module of his tiny ship and that even as those words were spoken the crew were fighting to regain control and figure out what had happened.

The full story of Apollo 13 has been well told many times. First by Lovell himself in the book Lost Moon which provided the basis for Ron Howard’s epic movie simply entitled Apollo 13 (in which Lovell appeared in a cameo role as captain of the recovery ship Iwo Jima shaking hands with Tom Hanks) and most recently in an engrossing Netflix documentary.

The rest of Lovell’s career has been over-shadowed by Apollo 13 but there was much more. In 1968 he was one of the crew of Apollo 8 which was the first mission to orbit the moon. That mission produced the first now-iconic images of the earth from deep space.

The first image of Earth from deep space. Image courtesy NASA

Lovell was a devout Catholic and many of his colleagues were also religious. The crew of Apollo 8 famously shared reading the first passages from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve concluding “God bless all of you on the good Earth”

Although the biblical reading and tone attracted secular criticism on Earth, Lovell stood by it and it remains one of the most memorable moments in the moon programme. For me it ranks up there or even higher than Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind”.

The iconic Earthrise picture taken from Apollo 8 in lunar orbit. Image courtesy NASA

By the time Apollo 11 (for which Lovell was backup crew captain) landed on the moon most of us were confident that everything would work. Apollo 8 was far back on the curve of testing missions that led to that result. When the astronauts made that reading, they had no certainty whatsoever that they would be returning to Earth. They paved the way for others to achieve greater fame.

Before that there were other milestones. In 1965 on Gemini 7 Lovell and Frank Borman set the record for the longest time in space to that point proving astronauts could live and work in space long enough to make a Moon mission possible. They also achieved the first successful orbital rendezvous.

Less than a year later Lovell commanded Gemini 12 with Buzz Aldrin as pilot. The last of the Gemini missions demonstrated an almost routine mastery of EVA, rendezvous, and docking - key skills needed to make Apollo successful.

Buzz Aldrin on EVA taken by Lovell on Gemini 12. Image courtesy NASA

Amongst the many dog-eared board games in my childhood home was one called Careers. The object of this game was to achieve your goals for fame fortune and happiness from your working career. No career brought greater rewards or more fame than that of astronaut. I recently saw that this game is still available, but the career of astronaut has been replaced by - Information Technology!

In a way this makes sense. There is a straight line between the developments of the early space programme and the development of Silicon Valley. The career in IT that has been so good to me would probably not have happened as it did without the work of Lovell and thousands of others that never got anywhere near going into space but made the achievements of the astronauts possible. The early space programme helped shape the world we know today.

For all of his achievements Jim Lovell never achieved what he really wanted, to walk on the moon. Nevertheless, he remains a true pioneer and hero of the space age.

He lost six of his colleagues and friends along the way and had no illusions about the dangers of his work, which he regular executed with competence, grace and charm.

There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 when they are preparing for re-entry. Lovell mistakenly takes the pilot’s seat and then apologises to Jack Swigert the most junior member of the crew saying as they change seats “she’s yours to fly”. That scene whether historically accurate or not is an accurate representation of both Lovell’s character and that of the space programme overall.

Lovell was above all a decent and resilient human being. Many of the early astronauts found the pressures of the work and fame too much for them. A majority of marriages ended in divorce. Jim remained married to his childhood sweetheart until death parted them after 70 years, and he is the last of his astronaut class to pass away.

At least one little Irish boy's heart will always cherish his memory.