Photo by Anna Knott
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Newsmaker
Still Not Over the Moon
By Bill Newcott, September & October 2008
NASA has had its problems, but Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell is ever the optimist
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NASA, born 50 years ago at the height of the cold war, was charged with a preposterous mission: “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth,” in the immortal words of John F. Kennedy, “before the decade is out.” What followed was an unprecedented burst of discovery that seemed poised to fuel missions far beyond the lunar landings of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
High in the firmament of shining stars who were America’s astronaut heroes is Jim Lovell, now 80. Tom Hanks memorably played the former mission commander in the movie Apollo 13 (“Houston, we have a problem”). And earlier, Lovell himself had a role in David Bowie’s cult classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth. (“The movie was kind of bad,” recalls Lovell. “We all slid down in our seats.”)
After the moon landing, NASA seemed to lower its sights, settling into the space shuttle and international space station programs, which, for all their technical wizardry, have never gotten humans out of low Earth orbit again.
Lovell and Apollo 13 figure heavily in Discovery Channel’s new six-part documentary, When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, a chronicle of America’s monumental leap for the moon. The miniseries re-airs on the cable network in late September, and the complete DVD set—including six hours of never-before-seen NASA footage—is for sale on Discovery's website.
But things are looking up. NASA is now planning to return to the moon by 2020, with the goal of building a launching pad to send humans to Mars. It’s ambitious (and, in tight budgetary times, perhaps outlandish)—but Lovell has seen the ambitious, and the outlandish, accomplished before. He spoke with us about past disappointments and dreams for the future.
“Some people work nine to five; they have a nice, orderly life. Other people need excitement, or risk, or adventure. And these are the people that NASA attracted in the early days. The early astronauts were all living on the edge.”
“When Apollo ended, NASA was like a ship without a rudder. People got frustrated. It happens a lot. People climb a mountain, they make a great name for themselves, and suddenly it stops. You’ve achieved it…and now what?”
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“It never occurred to me that 40 years later, no one would go back to the moon. With what we’d accomplished, I thought the momentum would continue. But I guess evolution goes two steps forward and one step back.”
“With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we didn’t have a good competitor. Americans have always had a competitive mindset—in athletics, in business. Now China says it wants to land a person on the moon, and I think that’s a good thing. We’ve got another competitor.”
“I went into business [as a telecommunications executive] and tried to make that exciting. I still fly airplanes, and I’m 80 years old. When I get up there, it’s just me and the airplane. The problems are left below. So I’m still sort of living on the edge.”
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