During the Apollo 13 mission to the Moon, a crucial oxygen tank burst, endangering the lives of the three astronauts onboard. Commander Jim Lovell contacted NASA’s Mission Control with the famous words, “Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
Despite a popular tendency to put the words in the present tense, it has become one of the most famous and oft-repeated phrases in history.
So much so that Jim Lovell, who has died at the age of 97, later joked that his only regret was not trademarking it.
Captain Lovell’s death was announced by NASA today.
The planned flight of Apollo 13 on 11 April 1970 was supposed to be a relatively straightforward mission.
This incident occurred after Apollo 11’s momentous achievement of landing the first human on the Moon and Apollo 12’s demonstration of precision landing capabilities.
Unlike its predecessors, this mission aimed to expand scientific understanding by collecting data and scouting potential upcoming landing sites.
However, the situation transformed into a riveting rescue operation that captivated audiences worldwide. NASA’s flight controllers and engineers had to devise innovative strategies to ensure the astronauts’ safe return to Earth.
Lovell, who was 42 at the time, was the most experienced NASA astronaut having spent 572 hours in space over three previous missions.
He had been aboard Apollo 8 for the first manned mission to orbit the Moon in 1968.
Now, as commander of Apollo 13, he was going to set foot on it along with his fellow astronauts, John ‘Jack’ Swigert and Fred Haise.
After its launch from Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, all seemed well until almost 56 hours into their journey when there was an explosion.
“I looked up at Fred Haise to see if he knew what caused the noise and I could tell from his expression, he had no idea,” Lovell recalled.
“Then I looked down at Jack Swigert in the command module and his eyes were as wide as saucers.
“And I could see that this was the start of a long, treacherous journey home.”
Swigert saw a warning light and radioed to Mission Control, “Okay Houston we’ve had a problem here.”
When NASA asked him to repeat the message, Lovell chimed in, “Uh, Houston we’ve had a problem.”
It was established that an explosion had ruptured an oxygen tank, causing their supply to escape into space.
The oxygen not only allowed them to breathe, it was critical in supplying the power the ship needed, including steering and lighting.
Some 200,000 miles from Earth and with dwindling resources, they now had to get back home as quickly as they could.
Mission Control directed the astronauts to move from the command module to the separate landing module, originally intended for two astronauts to descend onto the lunar surface.
To preserve power, the crew shut down all non-essential systems and rationed drinking water to maintain adequate cooling for the overstressed systems of the landing module.
With no heaters on they had to endure extreme cold and were cramped and uncomfortable.
These conditions needed to keep them alive for an estimated 90 hours, until they could transfer back to the damaged command module for re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
On 17 April, after the engineers in Houston succeeded in powering the command module back up, the crew prepared for the final stages of their journey to Earth by jettisoning the lunar module.
Shown live on TV, the BBC presenter Cliff Michelmore announced, “We are now coming to the last moments of Apollo 13 as it begins its re-entry. The best thing we can do now is just to listen and hope.”
In the tense minutes ahead, he watched in silence, chewing his fingernails. His presenting colleague, James Burke had his fingers crossed.
Finally, at 11:53 am, the crew safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, near Samoa. Applause and cheers erupted in Mission Control and across the world.
NASA classified the Apollo 13 mission as a “successful failure” because so many valuable lessons were learnt from it.
That included the introduction of a third oxygen tank situated away from the other two that could be used exclusively to provide air for astronauts.
The harrowing story was immortalized in the 1995 film ‘Apollo 13’, starring Tom Hanks as Captain Lovell, in which the real Lovell had a cameo role as captain of the recovery ship, USS Iwo Jima.
Lovell enjoyed the film, based on his 1994 book, ‘Lost Moon’, despite the Hanks mis-quote, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Asked what he thought of Hanks playing him, he joked, “I made him rich.”
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 14 March, 1928, James Arthur Lovell Jr. was the only child of James Lovell Sr., a Canadian-born coal furnace salesman and Blanch nee Masek, who was of Czechoslovakian descent.
After his father died in a car accident in 1933, Lovell Jr. lived with his mother at a relative’s home in Indiana before relocating to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he went to high school.
The tragic loss at such a young age was eased by his mother’s love.
“I didn’t have a father,” he said. “My mother raised me after my father essentially left us and she did an excellent job.”
From an early age, he had a keen interest in flying.
“I was born in 1928, and in 1927, Charles Lindbergh made that famous trip across the ocean, and so for boys of my age through the ’30s, airplanes were the big thing,” he recalled.
He was inspired to join the US Naval Academy by an uncle who had captivated him with his stories of flying biplanes on early aircraft carriers.
Lovell graduated from the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in 1952 and undertook flight training at the Naval Air Station Penascola before taking a test pilot training course in which he graduated top of the class.
He had begun dating Marilyn Lillie Gerlach at high school and, while studying at the academy, they went on a date in Annapolis when he suggested they stop at a jewellery shop to look at engagement rings.
“She’s always been mad at me about this,” he later recalled.
“She said, ‘What do you mean? Are you proposing to me?’ I guess I forgot to add the formality to it. I thought it was a given. So I asked, ‘Do you want to marry me?'”
Fortunately for him, she still did and they married on 6 June 1952 and had four children, Barbara, James, Susan and Jeffrey.
In 1962 NASA began recruiting its second group of astronauts intended to fly the Gemini and Apollo programmes.
Lovell spotted the advert in ‘Aviation Week & Space Technology’ magazine and decided to apply.
After being interviewed, he was amongst 32 finalists, later whittled down to nine, who moved to the Houston area that October to undergo training.
Gemini was part of the preparation for Apollo and the intention to land a man on the Moon. Lovell flew in space on Gemini 7 and 12.
While orbiting the moon on Apollo 8, he looked out through the window of his spacecraft and saw Earth, which appeared so small that he could obscure the view with his thumb.
“I thought how insignificant we really all are and yet how fortunate that we have a place to live,” he said, looking back at his life in 2018.
“I began to think that, you know, in reality, we often say that we hope to go to Heaven when we die.
“In reality, we go to Heaven when we’re born. We arrive on a planet with the proper mass that has the gravity that can contain water and an atmosphere – the very essentials for life.
“If you want to really pursue that to the extreme, St. Peter was that doctor you saw when you first opened your eyes. That’s my sort of philosophy right now.
“Enjoy life, take a moment, and look at what you have. Look at Lake Michigan. Feel the breeze on your cheek, and know that God has really given us ability to be here.
“God has given us a stage upon which to perform, and how the play turns out is really up to us.”
He retired from the space programme in 1973.
He had several senior roles in business and served on the board of directors for several organisations but was always open to requests to be interviewed about his time in space.
Jim’s wife, Marilynn, died in 2023 of natural causes, just a year after a documentary was released on Netflix showcasing the Apollo 13 disaster and rescue.
The high school sweethearts had been married for 71 years. Marilynn remains immortalised on the Moon.
During the Apollo 8 mission, her husband had noticed a 4,600-foot-tall mountain between the lava plains of the Sea of Tranquillity and Sea of Fertility.
He thought this an ideal landmark for the upcoming Apollo 11 astronauts and named it Mount Marilyn in honour of his wife.
Although he never managed to set his own foot on the lunar surface, he came to live with the disappointment and appreciated what the Apollo 13 mission became.
“It was an outstanding success in the way people reacted to a crisis and the leadership that was shown and the initiative that was produced,” he said.
“So I have a different feeling about it now.
“I couldn’t think of a better thing to come through to show what we can do if we put our minds to it.”
