NASA is honoring Jim Lovell for saving the 1970 lunar mission from potential disaster and successfully returning the crew to Earth. James “Jim” Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 who transformed a failed lunar mission into an incredible technical triumph, has died at the age of 97.
Apollo 13 was initially supposed to be just another mission to the moon, on which he would walk. But when an oxygen tank exploded in the spacecraft’s service compartment, 200,000 miles above Earth, everything changed.
