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Jim Lovell’s job never required him to be a poet. Once the most experienced man in space flight—with two trips in the Gemini program and two lunar missions in Apollo—Lovell, who died August 7 at age 97, went places few others have gone and saw things few others had seen. But that didn’t mean there was music when he spoke.
“We’re on our way, Frank,” was the best he could muster in 1965 when the engines on his Titan rocket lit and he and Frank Borman took off aboard Gemini 7. “Boy, boy, boy,” he said, when he and Buzz Aldrin splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of their Gemini 12 mission in 1966. “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” he intoned when a sudden explosion crippled his Apollo 13 spacecraft in 1970, reporting the incident as if it were nothing more troubling than the family car running out of windshield washer fluid.
None of this was Lovell’s fault. Jack Swigert, Lovell’s command module pilot aboard Apollo 13, once said that the very thing that qualified astronauts to embark on such potentially mortal missions as flights to the moon—a cool, engineer’s detachment from the scope of the experience and the chances they were taking—disqualified them from adopting the larger, epochal view of things. You could either go to the moon or you could appreciate the going; you couldn’t do both.
And yet once, in my experience, Lovell went lyrical. It was 1995, and his and my book about his Apollo 13 mission had just been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard. It was a gobsmacking experience for me. I had spent my career quietly toiling as a science journalist, enjoying some recognition for my work, but nothing remotely like fame. Lovell, on the other hand, knew a thing or two about being celebrated, being feted, being recognized in restaurants and sought out for interviews. And he knew, too, that fame was ephemeral—that the public’s attention could be a fickle and flickering thing. You are hailed…
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