Jim Lovell with the Apollo 11 command module behind him
© Paul Grover/Alamy Stock Photo
James Arthur Lovell Jr. died on 7 August 2025. He was an American astronaut, a navy pilot and a mechanical engineer. He is probably best known as the commander of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, and for his famous radio message to Houston Mission Control: ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’.
Lovell was born on 25 March 1928. As a child he was interested in rocketry, and built flying models as a teenager in Milwaukee. He attended the University of Wisconsin, where he studied engineering under a United States Navy programme, and later said he would not have been able to afford to go to university without this help.
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