He was designated a naval aviator on February 1, 1954, upon completion of pilot training, and was assigned to VC-3 at Moffett Field near San Francisco, California. He went to flight training at Naval Air Station Pensacola from October 1952 to February 1954. Lovell was one of 50 members of his 783-strong graduating class initially selected for naval aviation training. They had four children: Barbara, James, Susan, and Jeffrey. As a college student, Gerlach had transferred from Wisconsin State Teachers College to the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., so she could be near him while he was at Annapolis. The two had begun dating while they were in high school. On June 6, he married Marilyn Lillie Gerlach in a ceremony at St. He graduated in the spring of 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree and was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy. ĭuring his first year, Lovell wrote a treatise on the liquid-propellant rocket engine. Brophy, and entered Annapolis in July 1948. He secured a nomination from his local U.S. To avoid this prospect, Lovell decided to apply to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. There were concerns that some or most of the students who graduated as naval aviators would not have pilot billets to fill. While Lovell was attending pre-flight training in the summer of 1948, the Navy was beginning to make cutbacks in the program, and cadets were under a great deal of pressure to transfer out. At Wisconsin, he played college football and pledged to the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity. Lovell as an Annapolis midshipman in 1952Īfter graduating from high school, Lovell attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison for two years, where he studied engineering under the United States Navy's "Flying Midshipman" program from 1946 to 1948. He became interested in rocketry and built flying models as a teenager. He was a member of the Boy Scouts during his childhood and eventually achieved Eagle Scout, the organization's highest rank. They then relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he went to Juneau High School. For the first two years after the death of his father, Lovell and his mother lived with a relative in Terre Haute, Indiana. was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 25, 1928, the only child of James Lovell Sr., a Toronto, Ontario, Canada-born coal furnace salesman who died in a car accident in 1933 and Blanche née Masek, who was of Czech descent. 5.1 Military, federal service, and foreign awards.He co-authored the 1994 book Lost Moon, on which the 1995 film Apollo 13, in which he appeared in a cameo, was based. He is a recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. One of 24 people to have flown to the Moon, Lovell was the first to fly to it twice. He was the first person to fly into space four times. Prior to Apollo, Lovell flew in space on two Gemini missions, Gemini 7 (with Borman) in 1965 and Gemini 12 in 1966. Lovell was not selected by NASA as one of the Mercury Seven astronauts due to a temporarily high bilirubin count but was accepted in September 1962 as one of the second group of astronauts, needed for the Gemini and Apollo programs. The following year he became a flight instructor and safety engineering officer at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and completed Aviation Safety School at the University of Southern California. He was then assigned to Electronics Test, working with radar, and in 1960 he became the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II program manager. In January 1958, he entered a six-month test pilot training course at the Naval Air Test Center at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, with Class 20 and graduated at the top the class. This included a Western Pacific deployment aboard the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La. He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, circled the Moon and returned safely to Earth.Ī graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in the class of 1952, Lovell flew F2H Banshee night fighters. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he became, with Frank Borman and William Anders, one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon. ( / ˈ l ʌ v əl/ born March 25, 1928) is an American retired astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot and mechanical engineer.
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