Jim Lovell
Jim Lovell
James Arthur "Jim" Lovell, Jr.is a former NASA astronaut and a retired captain in the United States Navy, most famous as the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which suffered a critical failure en route to the Moon but was brought back safely to Earth by the efforts of the crew and mission control. Lovell was also the command module pilot of Apollo 8, the first Apollo mission to enter lunar orbit. He is a recipient of the Congressional Space...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAstronaut
Date of Birth25 March 1928
CountryUnited States of America
The training in those days was rather ad hoc because the people running NASA were basically engineers,
We hadn't seen any rats or evidence of rats until the school district started the eradication program, and then we started to see evidence of the rats moving across the fence line.
The fascination to go into space has existed for hundreds of years. But as we do things and they're successful, people get bored.
I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.
I didn't go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.
Boys like either dinosaurs or airplanes. I was very much an airplane boy.
The moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.
I was only a hero by default. The flights were few and far between. There weren't that many astronauts. The moon flights were so interesting and exciting.
We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.
Al was a very confident person, and he contributed a lot to the (space) program,
A lot of stuff, we had to learn ourselves. Training became some school work in those areas we were not familiar with, like orbital mechanics, the extensive gyroscopic systems for control of the vehicle.
Back in those days, going to the moon, geology was important, ... But how do we train pilots to be geologists? We concentrated on observing, not the analytical parts of the rocks.
That training really helped us on the second time around, ... It was one of those acts of fate.
Instead of starting the eradication on the outskirts and forcing the rats in they bombed the garden and moved them out of the area and forced them here. I understand the pressure they were under to take care of the rats and open the school but they didn't consider anything else besides their own problem.