Late Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell has received a tribute from Tom Hanks, the actor who brought him to life in an Oscar-winning movie and said he had gone places most wouldn’t dare.
“There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own,” Hanks said of Lovell in a heartfelt Instagram tribute post published after the astronaut’s death was announced on Friday. “Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy.”
Hanks portrayed Lovell in the 1995 film Apollo 13. Directed by Ron Howard and earning Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound, the film depicted the failed lunar mission that nearly cost Lovell and his crew their lives in 1970.
Apollo 13 was intended to be Nasa’s third crewed moon landing. But during the US space agency’s mission, manned by Lovell and fellow astronauts Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, an oxygen tank in the service module exploded roughly 200,000 miles (322,000km) from Earth.
Lovell famously informed mission control, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Hanks later immortalized the line in the film, which slightly altered the phrase to, “Houston, we have a problem.”
With their power and life-support systems crippled, the crew was forced to abandon their lunar landing and use several engine burns to slingshot around the far side of the moon, setting a course back to Earth. About three days after the explosion, they splashed down safely in the South Pacific, concluding what became known as the Apollo program’s “successful failure”.
“His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive,” Hanks wrote on Friday of Lovell. “And who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages.
“On this night of a full Moon, he passes on – to the heavens, to the cosmos, to the stars. God speed you, on this next voyage, Jim Lovell,” reads the end of the tribute.
Lovell died on Thursday at age 97 in Lake Forest, Illinois, Nasa said. The cause of death was not immediately released.
He made a brief cameo in Apollo 13 as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the navy ship that recovered the crew after splashdown. The film was nominated for a total of nine Oscars, including best picture.
Hanks starred in Apollo 13 alongside actors Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan and the late Bill Paxton.