Apollo 13 hero Jim Lovell has had his final orbit • The Register

Obit Jim Lovell, the former US astronaut and commander of the Apollo 13 mission, has died at the age of 97.

Jim Lovell reads a newspaper after the Apollo 13 mission ( Pic: NASA )

Lovell was selected as part of the second group of NASA astronauts in 1962, having missed out on becoming part of the original Mercury 7. The omission meant Lovell never got to fly in the Mercury capsule, which he more than made up for by being the first astronaut to fly into space four times, twice with the Gemini program and twice with Apollo.

His first mission was 1965’s Gemini 7, which he flew as pilot with Frank Borman as commander. The pair spent nearly 14 days in orbit – a record for the US until the first crewed Skylab mission in 1973 – and the spacecraft served as a passive rendezvous target for Gemini