Jim Lovell (1928–2025)

Outstanding nonfiction about the Apollo 13 mission. Lovell & Kluger manage to hold the technobabble to a bare minimum, though the verbatim calldowns through the different mission control consoles gets a bit wearing.

While the bulk of the book details the mission itself, its multitude of disastrous systems failures, and the incredible Earthside and spaceborne efforts to get the crew home safely, there is also background about Lovell's career, as well as a chilling review of the post-mission show more investigation into the root cause of the command module explosion that doomed the lunar landing.

There's also a fair amount of attention paid to Marilyn Lovell, both during the hair-raising mission itself and to the general substructure of astronaut wives and the support system they created among themselves.

Much of this material will be familiar to readers who have followed the beginnings of America's manned space program, whether readers lived through that period with the first glimmerings of the Mercury program in 1958 through the last, sad Apollo mission in 1972, or whether their only exposure to it has come second-hand through memoirs and documentaries. Yet nothing seems quite so fraught, quite so heartbreaking, or quite so edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, as those six days in 1970 when America, and the world, were brutally reminded that man-in-space was not routine, and that the technology that got us out there could also fail us with disastrous results. show less

"'Freddy,' Lovell said, turning to Haise. 'I'm afraid this is going to be the last moon mission for a long time.'"

This is the compelling story of the Apollo 13 disaster: the blow-out that disabled the command module and life support systems for astronauts James Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert, and the ensuing rescue efforts to bring them safely back to Earth. The story is told from the points of view of the astronauts, from all the engineers and staff at NASA Mission Control working show more frantically, and from the families who watched helplessly. There's a lot of detail here, as one crisis follows another, but it's not too technical and not boring.

If you've seen the Ron Howard movie, you will know the outline of the story (and the importance of duct tape), but it was still interesting to me to get all the details filled in. I was constantly amazed at the skill and ingenuity of the the astronauts and the people on the ground, as especially their dedication. The families, too, were amazing in their bravery and stoicism. It was a thrilling adventure to read, but also a very feel-good book.

Recommended.

4 stars show less

This was well-written and went by fairly quickly. Jim Lovell was one of the astronauts on Apollo 13, so this book provided a new perspective on the mission and what happens after "Houston, we have a problem." I appreciated the decision to write the book in the third person, since this also covered what happened in Mission Control as well as on the space shuttle. While the book generally did well in not descending into too much technobabble, I did have some trouble trying to keep the various show more acronyms (such as TELMU and FIDO) straight.

One of the things I found interesting was in the epilogue, which explained that the damage done to the spacecraft was not the result of a single catastrophic failure but rather a whole series of much smaller failures, none of which would have caused serious trouble on their own, but in combination led to disaster. Here it happened in a spaceship, and it made me think of the idea of Spaceship Earth and how we are entering the Anthropocene - and how any single, otherwise minor change might not be enough to destabilize an ecosystem or climate patterns but that a whole series of such changes could be disastrous. show less

This was well-written and went by fairly quickly. Jim Lovell was one of the astronauts on Apollo 13, so this book provided a new perspective on the mission and what happens after "Houston, we have a problem." I appreciated the decision to write the book in the third person, since this also covered what happened in Mission Control as well as on the space shuttle. While the book generally did well in not descending into too much technobabble, I did have some trouble trying to keep the various show more acronyms (such as TELMU and FIDO) straight.

One of the things I found interesting was in the epilogue, which explained that the damage done to the spacecraft was not the result of a single catastrophic failure but rather a whole series of much smaller failures, none of which would have caused serious trouble on their own, but in combination led to disaster. Here it happened in a spaceship, and it made me think of the idea of Spaceship Earth and how we are entering the Anthropocene - and how any single, otherwise minor change might not be enough to destabilize an ecosystem or climate patterns but that a whole series of such changes could be disastrous. show less