Attribution: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes and Bill Mullen
Kickass and the keeper hand it off to old Tribune friend Pulitzer winner Bill Mullen for his response to yesterday’s Kickass post about Jim Lovell on his 96th birthday. Thanks, Bill.
“And to think that Lovell grew up as a Wisconsin kid, dreaming big dreams about airplanes and rockets. He was at the UW, trying to get into the naval academy, and almost didn’t make it, though he eventually succeeded. He applied for and was rejected by the early astronaut programs, but he kept trying and eventually made it. He made two flights to the moon, the first on Apollo 8, which merely orbited the moon. The second time, he was commander of Apollo 13, the aborted moon-landing mission, a failed NASA project that turned out to be one of its most memorable successes by virtue of its heroism and ingenuity in the middle of a catastrophe. I interviewed a number of astronauts as a reporter. Most were aloof and distrustful of journalists, and Lovell, whom I interviewed several times at length, was pretty much that way, too, But his basic honesty and humility showed through. I discovered that he and Charles Lindbergh had a mutual admiration for each other. While Lovell was on the the Apollo 8 mission, Lindbergh, a devoted naturalist in his later years, was in a remote part of the Philippines doing ecological studies. To follow the progress of Apollo 8, he got into a small plane every night and flew to an altitude where he could pick up radio news. Afterwards, Lindbergh surprisingly (at least to me) said the mission was one of mankind’s greatest hallmark accomplishments, and made a strong case for it, explaining that Lovell and his two fellow astronauts on the flight were the first human beings in history to escape Earth’s gravity.”
–William Mullen
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