Jim Lovell’s job never required him to be a poet. Once the most experienced man in space flight—with two trips in the Gemini program and two lunar missions in Apollo—Lovell, who died August 7 at age 97, went places few others have gone and saw things few others had seen. But that didn’t mean there was music when he spoke.

“We’re on our way, Frank,” was the best he could muster in 1965 when the engines on his Titan rocket lit and he and Frank Borman took off aboard Gemini 7 . “Boy, boy, boy,” he said, when he and Buzz Aldrin splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of their Gemini 12 mission in 1966. “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” he intoned when a sudden explosion crippled his Apollo 13 spacecraft in 1970, reporting the incident as if it were nothing more troubling than the f

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