U.S. astronaut and naval aviator James "Jim" Lovell died Thursday in Illinois, United States, at the age of 97, the space agency NASA announced. Lovell and his colleagues were the first people to leave Earth orbit aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft. He and his team were the first to orbit the Moon.
He was also the first astronaut to read excerpts from the biblical book of Genesis to a captivated radio audience on Christmas Eve from space. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth... And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light," were his words on Christmas Day 1968. The broadcast ended with, "Good night, good luck and Merry Christmas. God bless you all, all of you on the good Earth." On December 21, 1968, the three American astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell undertook the first moon landing in history. Arriving three days later, they sent what were possibly the most expensive Christmas greetings ever made.
Suitable for Christmas
"I put my thumb up to the window of the spacecraft and managed to completely hide the Earth behind it. Earth is just a tiny dot in the Milky Way, but look at what we have here: water and atmosphere. We're orbiting a star at just the right distance to absorb its energy," Lovell later recalled of his missionary media appearance in a video interview released by NASA. "God has given humanity a stage on which to perform. The end of the play is entirely up to us," he continued. The men had performed audio broadcasts for an enthusiastic radio audience on Earth throughout the Apollo 8 mission. For the Christmas Eve broadcast, NASA had given them no specific instructions, only that they were to say something "appropriate."
His Apollo 13 mission also became legendary. Shortly after launch, an explosion occurred on board, caused by damaged wiring in one of the oxygen tanks. It was Lovell who first uttered the later famous phrase, "Houston, we have a problem." Lovell and his crewmates, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, worked under pressure 200,000 miles from home with ground controllers in Houston to make emergency repairs and returned safely to Earth. They survived what went down in history as one of the "most successful failures." People around the world, including Pope Paul VI, prayed for their return.
Never set foot on the moon
James Lovell was born on March 25, 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for two years and later transferred to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. A successful naval aviator, he became a NASA astronaut in 1962. He piloted two space missions as part of the Gemini program, including Gemini 7 in 1965, which marked the first rendezvous of two manned spacecraft in space. Lovell never managed to walk on the Moon, his "one regret," he told the Associated Press in 1995. The astronaut was a member of the Evangelical Reformed Church and married Marilyn Gerlach of Milwaukee in 1952. The couple had four children; Marilyn died in 2023.
This is a translation of an article that first appeared on the website Die-Tagespost. For the original article in German, see here . Republished in Omnes with permission.
