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Tag: James Lovell

  • James Lovell Fast Facts | CNN

    James Lovell Fast Facts | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of astronaut James Lovell.

    Birth date: March 25, 1928

    Birth place: Cleveland, Ohio

    Birth name: James Arthur Lovell Jr.

    Father: James Lovell Sr.

    Mother: Blanche Lovell

    Marriage: Marilyn (Gerlach) Lovell (1952-present)

    Children: Jeffrey, Susan, James III and Barbara

    Education: Attended University of Wisconsin, 1946-1948; US Naval Academy, B.S., 1952

    Military: US Navy, 1952-1973, Captain (Ret.)

    The first astronaut to make four space flights, including Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.

    He is the astronaut known for the phrase, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” during the Apollo 13 mission.

    Has more than 715 hours of spaceflight.

    On Christmas Eve, the Apollo 8 astronauts described the moon and then read from the book of Genesis during a live television broadcast from space.

    1958-1962 – Works as a test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland.

    September 1962 – Is selected by NASA to be an astronaut.

    December 4-18, 1965 – Serves as the pilot on Gemini 7 under Commander Frank Borman. They are joined in space by Gemini 6; it is the first manned spacecraft rendezvous.

    November 11-15, 1966 – Serves as the commander of Gemini 12, with pilot Buzz Aldrin.

    December 21-27, 1968 – Along with crewmen Borman and William Anders, Lovell serves as command module pilot of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon.

    April 11-17, 1970 – Serves as commander of Apollo 13 with crew John Swigert and Fred Haise. An explosion two days into the flight causes the mission to be aborted, and the remaining time is spent working towards returning to Earth safely.

    April 18, 1970 – Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

    1971-1973 – Serves as deputy director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    March 1, 1973 – Retires from the Navy and NASA. Begins working at the Bay-Houston Towing Company.

    January 1977 – Is appointed president of Fisk Telephone Systems, Inc.

    1981 – Is named an executive vice president of Centel Corporation, which acquired Fisk Telephone Systems in 1980.

    1991 – Retires from Centel Corporation.

    March 19, 1993 – Lovell Is inducted into the US Astronauts Hall of Fame.

    1994 – Lovell’s book, co-written with Jeffrey Kluger, “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13,” is published.

    1995 – The movie “Apollo 13” premieres. Lovell’s character is played by Tom Hanks.

    July 26, 1995 – Is awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton.

    1998 – Is enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

    1999 – Opens the restaurant Lovells of Lake Forest in Lake Forest, Illinois.

    October 2010 – The Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center is established in Chicago.

    November 2011 – An Apollo 13 checklist that Lovell used for calculations sells at auction for $388,375. After the sale, NASA questions whether Lovell had the right to sell the checklist.

    January 2012 – NASA Chief Charles Bolden meets with Lovell and other astronauts to discuss to work out the issue of artifact ownership. No agreement is reached.

    September 2012 – President Barack Obama signs a bill into law giving NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts full ownership rights to the artifacts they collected from their missions.

    September 8, 2018 – Is honored with the Adler Planetarium’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

    July 20, 2019 – Sotheby’s offers a “Space Exploration” auction which includes many personal items from Lovell and the other astronauts involved in the Apollo moon missions. Days later, three original NASA moon landing videos sell for $1.82 million at the auction.

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  • Today in History: November 15, Sherman’s “March to the Sea”

    Today in History: November 15, Sherman’s “March to the Sea”

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    Today in History

    Today is Tuesday, Nov. 15, the 319th day of 2022. There are 46 days left in the year.

    Today’s Highlight in History:

    On Nov. 15, 1864, during the Civil War, Union forces led by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh (teh-KUM’-seh) Sherman began their “March to the Sea” from Atlanta; the campaign ended with the capture of Savannah on Dec. 21.

    On this date:

    In 1777, the Second Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation.

    In 1806, explorer Zebulon Pike sighted the mountaintop now known as Pikes Peak in present-day Colorado.

    In 1937, at the U.S. Capitol, members of the House and Senate met in air-conditioned chambers for the first time.

    In 1942, the naval Battle of Guadalcanal ended during World War II with a decisive U.S. victory over Japanese forces.

    In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

    In 1959, four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, were found murdered in their home. (Ex-convicts Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were later convicted of the killings and hanged in a case made famous by the Truman Capote book “In Cold Blood.”)

    In 1961, former Argentine President Juan Peron, living in exile in Spain, married his third wife, Isabel.

    In 1966, the flight of Gemini 12, the final mission of the Gemini program, ended successfully as astronauts James A. Lovell and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. splashed down safely in the Atlantic after spending four days in orbit.

    In 1969, a quarter of a million protesters staged a peaceful demonstration in Washington against the Vietnam War.

    In 1984, Stephanie Fae Beauclair, the infant publicly known as “Baby Fae” who had received a baboon’s heart to replace her own congenitally deformed one, died at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California three weeks after the transplant.

    In 2003, two Black Hawk helicopters collided and crashed in Iraq; 17 U.S. troops were killed.

    In 2019, Roger Stone, a longtime friend and ally of President Donald Trump, was convicted of all seven counts in a federal indictment accusing him of lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation of whether Trump coordinated with Russia during the 2016 campaign. (As Stone was about to begin serving a 40-month prison sentence, Trump commuted the sentence.)

    Ten years ago: The Justice Department announced that BP had agreed to plead guilty to a raft of charges in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and pay a record $4.5 billion, including nearly $1.3 billion in criminal fines. Four veterans were killed and 13 people injured when a freight train slammed into a parade float carrying wounded warriors and their spouses at a rail crossing in Midland, Texas.

    Five years ago: Zimbabwe’s military was in control of the country’s capital and the state broadcaster and held 93-year-old President Robert Mugabe and his wife under house arrest; the military emphasized that it had not staged a takeover but was instead starting a process to restore the country’s democracy. (The military intervention, hugely popular in Zimbabwe, led to impeachment proceedings against Mugabe, who was replaced.) Eight members of a family who were among more than two dozen people killed in a shooting at a small Texas church were mourned at a funeral attended by 3,000 people.

    One year ago: President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping spoke for more than three hours by video amid mounting tensions in the U.S.-China relationship. Biden signed his hard-fought $1 trillion infrastructure deal into law before a bipartisan, celebratory crowd on the White House lawn. A Connecticut judge found Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones liable for damages in lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting; the parents sued Jones over his claims that the massacre was a hoax. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2022 to the seat he’d held since 1975.

    Today’s Birthdays: Singer Petula Clark is 90. Actor Sam Waterston is 82. Classical conductor Daniel Barenboim is 80. Pop singer Frida (ABBA) is 77. Actor Bob Gunton is 77. Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is 75. Actor Beverly D’Angelo is 71. Director-actor James Widdoes is 69. Rock singer-producer Mitch Easter is 68. News correspondent John Roberts is 66. Former “Tonight Show” bandleader Kevin Eubanks is 65. Comedian Judy Gold is 60. Actor Rachel True is 56. Rapper E-40 is 55. Country singer Jack Ingram is 52. Actor Jay Harrington is 51. Actor Jonny Lee Miller is 50. Actor Sydney Tamiia (tuh-MY’-yuh) Poitier-Heartsong is 49. Rock singer-musician Chad Kroeger is 48. Rock musician Jesse Sandoval is 48. Actor Virginie Ledoyen is 46. Actor Sean Murray is 45. Pop singer Ace Young (TV: “American Idol”) is 42. Golfer Lorena Ochoa (lohr-AY’-nah oh-CHOH’-uh) is 41. Hip-hop artist B.o.B is 34. Actor Shailene Woodley is 31. Actor-dancer Emma Dumont is 28.

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  • Astronaut James McDivitt, Apollo 9 commander, dies at 93

    Astronaut James McDivitt, Apollo 9 commander, dies at 93

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    WASHINGTON — James A. McDivitt, who commanded the Apollo 9 mission testing the first complete set of equipment to go to the moon, has died. He was 93.

    McDivitt was also the commander of 1965’s Gemini 4 mission, where his best friend and colleague Ed White made the first U.S. spacewalk. His photographs of White during the spacewalk became iconic images.

    He passed on a chance to land on the moon and instead became the space agency’s program manager for five Apollo missions after the Apollo 11 moon landing.

    McDivitt died Thursday in Tucson, Arizona, NASA said Monday.

    In his first flight in 1965, McDivitt reported seeing “something out there’’ about the shape of a beer can flying outside his Gemini spaceship. People called it a UFO and McDivitt would later joke that he became “a world-renowned UFO expert.” Years later he figured it was just a reflection of bolts in the window.

    Apollo 9, which orbited Earth and didn’t go further, was one of the lesser remembered space missions of NASA’s program. In a 1999 oral history, McDivitt said it didn’t bother him that it was overlooked: “I could see why they would, you know, it didn’t land on the moon. And so it’s hardly part of Apollo. But the lunar module was … key to the whole program.”

    Flying with Apollo 9 crewmates Rusty Schweickart and David Scott, McDivitt’s mission was the first in-space test of the lightweight lunar lander, nicknamed Spider. Their goal was to see if people could live in it, if it could dock in orbit and — something that became crucial in the Apollo 13 crisis — if the lunar module’s engines could control the stack of spacecraft, which included the command module Gumdrop.

    Early in training, McDivitt was not impressed with how flimsy the lunar module seemed: “I looked at Rusty and he looked at me, and we said, ‘Oh my God! We’re actually going to fly something like this?’ So it was really chintzy. … it was like cellophane and tin foil put together with Scotch tape and staples!”

    Unlike many of his fellow astronauts, McDivitt didn’t yearn to fly from childhood. He was just good at it.

    McDivitt didn’t have money for college growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He worked for a year before going to junior college. When he joined the Air Force at 20, soon after the Korean War broke out, he had never been on an airplane. He was accepted for pilot training before he had ever been off the ground.

    “Fortunately, I liked it,” he later recalled.

    McDivitt flew 145 combat missions in Korea and came back to Michigan where he graduated from the University of Michigan with an aeronautical engineering degree. He later was one of the elite test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base and became the first student in the Air Force’s Aerospace Research Pilot School. The military was working on its own later-abandoned human space missions.

    In 1962, NASA chose McDivitt to be part of its second class of astronauts, often called the “New Nine,” joining Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and others.

    McDivitt was picked to command the second two-man Gemini mission, along with White. The four-day mission in 1965 circled the globe 66 times.

    Apollo 9’s shakedown flight lasted 10 days in March 1969 — four months before the moon landing — and was relatively trouble free and uneventful.

    “After I flew Apollo 9 it was apparent to me that I wasn’t going to be the first guy to land on the moon, which was important to me,” McDivitt recalled in 1999. “And being the second or third guy wasn’t that important to me.”

    So McDivitt went into management, first of the Apollo lunar lander, then for the Houston part of the entire program.

    McDivitt left NASA and the Air Force in 1972 for a series of private industry jobs, including president of the railcar division at Pullman Inc. and a senior position at aerospace firm Rockwell International. He retired from the military with the rank of brigadier general.

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