Lovell comes to Lovell

Astronaut Jim Lovell visited Lovell in 2002

Editor’s note: This is a reprint of a story written in July of 2002 when astronaut Jim Lovell and his son, Jay, visited our community and helped dedicate the new Veterans Park in downtown Lovell. Jim Lovell died last Thursday, Aug. 7, at the age of 97, and his legacy has been celebrated throughout the country in the days following.

Jim Lovell might not be the easiest man in the world to impress.

He has rocketed into space four times. He’s been to the moon and back twice, although he never walked on the lunar surface. And at the time of his retirement from the U.S. space program, he had logged more time in space than any other man on earth.

He has been the chief consultant on a major Hollywood blockbuster, and he is on a first-name basis with the likes of Tom Hanks and Ron Howard.

But even with all of his many fantastic experiences behind him, Jim Lovell said Sunday that the hospitality shown him by the people of Lovell and north Big Horn County has made a tremendous impression on him.

Lovell and son Jay sat down Sunday morning before departing for Yellowstone National Park – his final tour in an event-filled trip to Wyoming – to reflect on his week in the Cowboy State.

“Oh, this was even a lot more than we expected,” Jim Lovell said when asked if his week in Lovell lived up to his expectations. Noting that Cal Taggart had first invited him back in 1969, he added, “I always sort of wanted to come back here anyway. …The hospitality here has been fantastic. The schedule was great. The stuff we did here was stuff we wanted to do, that we wanted to see. It was well organized.

“The main thing is we met good people. It’s a nice, close-knit community. And a lot of the community looks like it’s young. There were a lot of young boys and girls, little kids, along the sidewalk as we did the parade, really cute kids. And everybody knows everybody.

“We were really happy to be invited to come out here and participate in Mustang Days.”

Added son Jay, who accompanied his father on the trip, “I really enjoyed myself. The fishing was great. And (meeting people) was like talking to guys I’ve known all my life. Everyone really bent over backwards to make us feel at home.”

Jim Lovell added that they would like to come back in the future, saying with a chuckle, “I’ve put enough hints out the whole week about going elk hunting.”

“It’s the backbone of America,” noted Jay. “You don’t see this in big cities.”

“You can see how patriotic this city is,” added Jim. “In fact, I think all of Wyoming is like that. I think it’s a very patriotic state, just the fact that a little town with about 2,500 people will put up a veterans memorial park shows really what the backbone of America is.

“You hear so much about anti-Americanism sometimes that it’s a welcome relief to come someplace where everbody’s basically down to earth and patriotic.”

Jim Lovell touched on a variety of topics during a discussion of his career and made the following observations:

•Early interest – Lovell said he was no Johnny-come-lately when it came to the space program, noting that he was interested in astronomy and rockets as a boy, reading about the father of American rocketry Dr. Robert Goddard and building small rockets with his friends.

He said he wanted to study “rocket engineering” in college. Since his father had died when he was 12, his mother couldn’t afford to send him to recommended programs in mechanics and thermodynamics at MIT or Cal-Tech. But he was able to get his first two years of college paid for through an ROTC scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, and he went on to earn a mechanical engineering degree. He wrote his term paper in 1951 on the development of the liquid fuel rocket engine.

“I say all this because I want to show you that I was very much interested in all of this whole business long before NASA, long before astronauts, long before anybody thought about putting people into space,” he said. “I always say I was interested in rockets and the space program before those other guys could spell rocket.”

•Picking astronauts -- Lovell became a Naval aviator and then a test pilot, working on the development of the F-4 Phantom, among other jet airplanes. When the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration started looking for astronauts, President Dwight Eisenhower suggested that test pilots would be a good fit for the new program.

NASA’s criteria included the requirement of an engineering degree, 1,000 hours flying jet airplanes and graduation from test pilots’ school, among other things, and computers came up with 110 names from Air Force and Navy rosters that fit the basic requirements, including Lovell. Classified orders were given to those selected to come to Washington, D.C., for a briefing.

Lovell said the idea of putting a man in a capsule on top of an Atlas rocket “seemed kind of wild, but for me this was exactly what I always wanted to do. I thought ‘this is great’ so of course I applied.”

Of the original 32 astronauts chosen as finalists, Lovell was the only one to flunk the physical due to a test that showed a high bilirubin count, and he was not one of the original seven chosen. A flight surgeon he knew was able to get him retested, and he was later given the OK to continue and was assigned to the Gemini program, flying aboard Gemini 7 in 1965 and Gemini 12 in 1966.

•Apollo – Lovell got his chance to fly to the moon for the first time in 1968 thanks, in part, to Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the space race. Apollo 8 was originally designed to be a mission to test the newly-designed lunar module, orbiting the earth during the testing, but when the CIA received intelligence that the Soviets were looking to send a crew around the moon and back (without orbiting), and with the LM not yet ready for testing, NASA quickly shifted gears and sent Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders on the first flight to the moon.

In what Lovell called “a very bold move,” NASA sent Apollo 8 to orbit the moon propelled by the new Saturn V rocket, sending the first close-up television images of the lunar surface back to earth. The mission also gave people around the world the first images of a tiny earth resting in the blackness of space, seemingly fragile and isolated. The famous “Earthrise” photo was taken by the Apollo 8 crew.

Lovell noted that in the movie “Apollo 13” Tom Hanks, playing Lovell, at one point puts his thumb out and covers the earth as seen through the spacecraft window, and he said that kind of experience made an impression on him.

“You suddenly realize that everything you’ve ever known – your home, your loved ones, your business, your country, the world itself with all of its problems -- is behind your thumb, and it gives you a feeling of how insignificant we really all are,” he said. “It’s too bad we can’t take out all of the world leaders and show them what they’ve got to work with.”

•A successful failure – Lovell said that after the euphoria of the Apollo 13 crew returning home safely, NASA, driven by successes and wanting to avoid failures, wanted to completely forget about the failed Apollo 13 mission, and Lovell said he was initially disappointed and frustrated by never walking on the moon.

But the space agency later came to realize what a triumph the mission was by solving the problems aboard the crippled spacecraft, using the lunar module as a lifeboat and returning the crew safely home. He said the mission showed how people “through good leadership and teamwork can bring back an almost certain catastrophe to a successful recovery,” adding, “I’ve often called the flight a successful failure.”

•Our future in space – While the Challenger disaster taught people that spaceflight is never routine, Lovell said it is a natural reaction for citizens and the media to stop paying close attention to a program that has launched more than 100 successful space shuttle missions.

“People become complacent with success after success,” he said. “It’s only when a problem happens, like if you’re going to a car race, everybody watches the first curve for the accident. Getting on the (space shuttle) orbiter now is like getting on United Airlines. There’s no R&D there anymore. The work is now being done once you’re in space.

“That’s why it falls off the front page of newspapers and you don’t see it on the evening news. That’s a natural phenomenon in the news industry. You can’t keep reporting the same consistent thing all the time.”

Since NASA is rooted in only certain parts of the country, Lovell said the agency struggles with funding support from other parts of the nation, but he said the space program is here to stay. He said the International Space Station is as much about nations working together (16 countries are involved) as it is about technology.

“Think of the cooperation and the intercourse between these countries working together on the same project, which gives us the rapport to work together, which is a great advantage,” he said. “This is one of the great intangible benefits. The other is education. NASA has been at the forefront of education in this country.”

Lovell said the space program is “here to stay,” adding, “It’s not a fad. It’s going to be here.” He said he believes the international community will send astronauts to Mars because the technology exists to get there, although he said, “I couldn’t tell you (what the scientific benefits would be) aside from the fact that we achieved something. But I know it’s going to happen.”

•The movie – Lovell said the movie “Apollo 13” was very accurate in its portrayal of the perilous mission, but in the beginning he almost pulled his support for the project. He said director Ron Howard jumped on the movie project after reading an initial draft of the book “Lost Moon” written by Lovell and Jeff Kluger.

After Lovell and Kluger sent further chapters of the book to Universal Studios, Lovell was horrified to read the first screenplay, noting it contained 23 “F words.” He said his reaction was, “This is awful. We didn’t swear like that.” He contacted Howard, who had also read the script, and Howard “threw it out.”

Howard and the studio started over, and Lovell sent the studio copies of the actual air-to-ground transmissions from the mission. Howard kept the project “pretty true to the story” with Lovell acting as an official consultant to the project.

The only scene in the movie where the director and producers took a great deal of poetic license, Lovell said, was the “stirring the tanks” argument between Fred Haise and Jack Swigart with Lovell playing referee. That argument never took place, Lovell said, adding that he urged the producers to not include it in the movie. But the filmmakers said they needed to show the anxiety, stress and strain of the situation, and dialogue was a better way to show the emotions than “sweat on the brow.”

Lovell said he mostly stayed away from the filming of the movie, noting that Hanks had enough trouble portraying someone still living without the subject standing behind the camera watching his every move during a scene.

•Astronaut dad – Jay Lovell said he knew the Apollo 13 mission was in trouble as a boy when he was awakened in the middle of the night by the headmaster of the military school he was attending and informed of the situation. But he said he didn’t know how close he came to losing his father until reading his book years later, because Jim Lovell didn’t talk about the mission much.

Jay also said he didn’t think being an astronaut’s kid was anything special growing up, noting everyone in his neighborhood worked in the aerospace industry and that his dad “went off to work” like all of the other fathers.