Today in Technology History

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March 25

James Arthur Lovell, Jr. (born 1928) One of NASA's most famous astronauts celebrates his 75th birthday today.

James Arthur Lovell, Jr. was born in Cleveland on March 25, 1928. He took an early interest in flight, and built and tested model rockets when he was in school. He then became a naval aviator and eventually a test pilot. Given his flight experience, his lifelong interest in rocketry, and the fact that his senior thesis at the U.S. Naval Academy had been about liquid fuel rockets, it's not surprising that NASA selected him to be an astronaut in 1962.

Jim Lovell went up into space four times. First, on the Gemini 7 mission in 1965, he set a new space endurance record, staying two weeks in a tiny space capsule with another astronaut. During that mission, Lovell's capsule also achieved the first successful rendezvous with another spacecraft.

He practiced space rendezvous again on his second trip to space, the four-day Gemini 12 mission with Buzz Aldrin, who would later become the second man to walk on the Moon.

On the Apollo 8 mission, Lovell and his crewmates became the first people to orbit the Moon and the first to see the far side of the Moon, although they never actually landed.

Lovell was supposed to land on the Moon during his most famous space mission: Apollo 13. That mission was interrupted by an exploding oxygen tank that crippled the command module and forced the crew to squeeze into the small lunar module. Thanks to some brilliant brainstorming by the astronauts and the NASA engineers on the ground, the crew of three returned safely to Earth after four days. (That exciting story was used as the basis for the 1995 movie Apollo 13, in which Tom Hanks played Lovell.)

Lovell retired from NASA and the Navy in 1973.

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