Apollo 13 mission leader, Navy veteran James Lovell (USNA '52) dies at 97
Lovell died Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois, NASA said in a statement on Friday.
James A. Lovell was born 25 March 1928, in Cleveland. He attended the University of Wisconsin before transferring to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. On the day he graduated in 1952, he and his wife, Marilyn, were married.
A test pilot at the Navy Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland, Lovell was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1962. He was the last of that second group of astronauts — called “the Next Nine” — alive and thus had been an astronaut longer than any other person alive.
In all, Lovell flew four space missions — and until the Skylab flights of the mid-1970s, he held the world record for the longest time in space with 715 hours, 4 minutes and 57 seconds.