Call-sign “Odyssey”

Remembering Jim Lovell (1928-2025)

A personal reflection

Jim in front of the Apollo 10 Command Module at the Science Museum, London. Image credit: the Science Museum

“We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.”

Jim Lovell

Even as I read the headlines in the early hours of Saturday 9 August I knew it wasn’t true. Jim Lovell couldn’t really be gone. Along with Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, Lovell had rightly achieved a form of immortality by repeatedly defying death back in the spring of 1970 as all three of them nursed their stricken spacecraft back to Earth. It was a rare instance of reality trumping fiction, a story dramatic enough to re-engage the public’s waning interest in the Apollo Moon-shots. A “would-they/wouldn’t-they” survival scenario that was irresistible fodder for the Hollywood movie that was sure to follow. As indeed it did with Lovell morphing into Tom Hanks when the actor was at the height of his Forest Gump fame. How’s that for immortality?

No Moon-shot had more of a cultural impact that Apollo 13. The whole episode, played out on prime time TV, was like an Arthur C. Clarke story; the narrative only lacked an errant computer programme that might have turned the damaged spacecraft into an Emergency Rescue Vehicle (“I’m sorry, Jim, but I can’ get you back home safely. There just isn’t enough oxygen for all three of you.”) Which was a function – converting a damaged lunar lander into a lifeboat – that the astronauts themselves performed superbly, along with a lot of support from the highly stressed teams back at Mission Control, who were forced to sweat-out that return journey as it happened in real time, minute by minute, nautical mile by nautical mile. Just like you always said it would be Arthur, only more so, and with the humans saving themselves. Who needs HAL the sentient super-computer when the chips are down? Humans are still the best problem solvers and always will be. Ironically enough, the mission’s Command Module was in fact christened Odyssey by Lovell, partly in recognition of the recently released movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Clarke co-wrote the screenplay for, along with Staney Kubrick.

Unlucky 13? Well, not really. The mission made celebrities of its crew who toured the chat shows in the aftermath, regaling America with the epic story of their courage, endurance, and lifesaving improvisational skills. Swigert with his matinee idol good looks, the eminently eligible bachelor, accompanied by the shy and more reserved Haise, and the ever-affable Lovell. The mission commander was a man who always had the appearance of someone who couldn’t quite believe his outrageous good fortune – test pilot, astronaut, and soon to be proxy movie star.

There are few more iconic images from the Apollo programme than the sight of Lovell running along Cocoa beach with the fully stacked Saturn V (von Braun’s ramped-up V2 poised to strike the already cratered Frau Mauro highlands rather than the urban landscape of war-time London) in the background. If that’s not a scene from a real life movie – The Conquest of Space, maybe, or Destination Moon – it’s hard to imagine what might be.

In many ways, those three Moon voyagers are like the astronauts in one of J.G. Ballard’s short stories, forever circling the Earth in a failed space capsule, one that can’t quite find the right co-ordinates to re-enter the planet’s atmosphere. Still broadcasting a cryptic call-sign to a world that no longer really cares, the gantries and the launch towers of Cape Kennedy now like ciphers in a language no one can read, monuments to the grandeur of Kennedy’s dream (a dream which eventually died in Dealey Plaza along with the boy President himself, both victims of the sniper’s bullet).  

The steady drumbeat of Gil Scott-Heron’s song-cum-poem-cum-anthem “Whitey on the Moon” has long been a challenge to those who continue to celebrate the Apollo missions (without perhaps ever glancing in history’s rear view mirror). Were they worth all that money and effort at a time when America was tearing itself apart with civil unrest, the internal violence arising from the impact of racial segregation, the assassination of prominent political figures (including Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy), and the horrors of the Vietnam War? Perhaps, but only if we eventually do go back and finally construct the permanent habitats that artists such as David A. Hardy and Chesley Bonestell conceived of decades ago. Thus making good on the temporary camps set up by the lunar explorers who got there first, if only for a few days at a time.

Someone once wrote to Frank Borman to thank him for saving 1968 when Apollo 8 circled the Moon and sent back that famous reading from the Book of Genesis, a brief flaring of hope and optimism at the end of a catastrophic decade. Lovell was of course part of that mission’s crew, his eyes scanning the lunar terrain, knowing even as he did so that he stood a good chance of returning and leaving footprints in the soft powdery surface. Perhaps we all owe a similar vote of thanks to the crew of Apollo 13 for saving the decade that followed and reminding us what human beings can achieve in the most extreme and adverse of circumstances.

There is indeed a “fire on the Moon” as Norman Mailer once claimed and it burns to this day in part due to Jim Lovell, a man who never actually walked on that desolate world but who left giant tracks in the history of spaceflight nonetheless. “Iter tutum ad astra,” Jim – a safe journey to the stars.      

Mark Stewart, FBIS

Editor

Odyssey - the Science Fiction, Space Art and Cultural Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society 

Left: Shooting for the Moon: on a mission to save 1968: Lovell as a member of the Apollo 8 crew. Image credit: Time magazine

Right: The overlap of fact and fiction: Jim in a cameo role in Ron Howard’s 1995 movie Apollo 13. Image credit: Imagine Entertainment and Universal Studios.