{"id":131143,"date":"2025-08-09T07:21:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T07:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/131143\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T07:21:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T07:21:15","slug":"tom-hanks-who-portrayed-jim-lovell-in-apollo-13-pays-tribute-to-the-late-astronaut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/131143\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Hanks, who portrayed Jim Lovell in \u2018Apollo 13,\u2019 pays tribute to the late astronaut"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Hanks<\/a> is honoring the real-life hero that he once portrayed in a popular, Oscar-winning film.<\/p>\n

After the death of astronaut Jim Lovell<\/a> was announced on Friday, Hanks shared a poignant social media post to his Instagram<\/a>, writing, \u201cThere are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJim 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,\u201d Hanks added in the post.<\/p>\n

The actor portrayed Lovell in the 1995 Ron Howard-directed film \u201cApollo 13,\u201d which told the story of Lovell\u2019s failed lunar space mission which almost cost him and his crew their lives in 1970.<\/p>\n

Apollo 13 would have marked NASA\u2019s third successful crewed moon landing, but during the ill-fated mission \u2013 which carried Lovell as well as astronauts John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. on board \u2013 an oxygen tank located on the crew\u2019s service module exploded when they were about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) away from Earth.<\/p>\n

Lovell famously delivered<\/a> the news to mission control, saying \u201cHouston, we\u2019ve had a problem.\u201d The exchange was later immortalized by Hanks in the \u201cApollo 13\u201d movie, which costarred Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan and the late Bill Paxton.<\/p>\n

With the damage effectively taking out their power source and other life support supplies, the Apollo 13 crew had to abruptly abandon their trek to the lunar surface and use several engine burns to swing around the far side of the moon and put themselves on a course back toward Earth.<\/p>\n

The three-person crew made a high-stakes splashdown return in the South Pacific Ocean about three days after the tank explosion, marking the conclusion of what has come to be known as the \u201csuccessful failure\u201d of the Apollo missions.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis 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 \u2013 and who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages,\u201d Hanks wrote in his tribute on Friday.<\/p>\n

Lovell died at age 97 on Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois, according to a NASA news release<\/a>, CNN previously reported. The cause of death was not immediately clear.<\/p>\n

He made a brief cameo in the movie as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the Navy ship that recovered the Apollo 13 crew after splashdown.<\/p>\n

\u201cApollo 13\u201d was nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture, and won two, for best film editing and best sound.<\/p>\n

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