Apollo 13 survival documentary: Jim Lovell’s children reflect on his ill-fated final mission

President Richard M. Nixon and the Apollo 13 crew pay their respects to the US flag during post-mission ceremonies at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, USA, on April 18, 1970. Photo / Getty Images

Ahead of a new film, the children of Nasa commander Jim Lovell recall the trauma of his final mission.

“Dad always says: ‘Never leave home without duct tape!’,” chuckles Jeff Lovell, whose father, Jim, is best known for commanding Nasa’s ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in April 1970. ­After an onboard explosion left their Moon-bound craft leaking oxygen into space, 321,869km from Earth, it was duct tape that Lovell senior and his crew used to fashion a makeshift carbon dioxide filter from a sock and a flight-­manual cover – a solution that would keep them alive for the four days it took to “slingshot” around the Moon and return safely to Earth.

It’s an episode of history that many will recall mostly from its dramatisation in Ron Howard’s 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, in which Lovell is played by Tom Hanks and his crew members, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, by Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton respectively. But this month a new feature-length Netflix documentary, Apollo 13: Survival, draws on more than 7000 hours of original footage in an attempt to tell the true story of Nasa’s “successful failure” from a more personal angle.

Over a video call from his home in Texas – a Lego model of the Saturn 5 rocket that powered the Apollo missions sitting on the shelf behind him – the easy-going Jeff Lovell, 58, admits that when Peter Middleton, the documentary’s director “came to me with the idea for the film, I said: ‘What can you do that’s new?’ He said he wanted to weave in the experience of our family in a way that would give people a whole new perspective. We gave him access to many hours of home videos and personal photographs. I hope that makes it a much more emotional, human story.”

Middleton’s film is dedicated to Jim Lovell’s wife, Marilyn: she died last August aged 93; Jim is 96. “Mum and Dad were a team,” says Jeff. “High-school sweethearts who grew up with nothing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dad was raised in a single-room apartment by a single mum where he slept on the couch. Mum was the youngest of five. They came up through the Depression and the War. She typed up Dad’s PhD. She learned to accept the risks of his job as a military test pilot before he went into space.”

Jeff raises his palms in awe and then shrugs. “Astronauts’ wives played a part in the space programme that has never really gotten the credit that was due. They were just thrown into the fire: they had to stay firm as the backbones of these families; they had to run the homes, pay the bills, protect the kids from the fear and attention and prepare for it all to go wrong.”

Come back soon: Marilyn and the Lovell children, from left, Barbara, James, Jeff and Susan watch Jim blast off on the earlier Apollo 8 mission in 1968. Photo / Getty Images

Speaking later from his office in London, Middleton says that one of the most revealing pieces of footage he found shows Marilyn Lovell at a press conference ahead of the Apollo 13 flight. “By that point, I think Jim was the most travelled human being in history,” he says. “By the age of 42, a father of four, he had clocked up more miles in space than all of the Russian cosmonauts put together. He’d spent two weeks in space on the Gemini 7 mission in 1965. He’d been around the Moon on Apollo 8 [three years later]. But Marilyn had very significant reservations about him going back up there. She thought he was pushing his luck and you can see that on her face in the footage we found.”

Jeff Lovell agrees that the scene is one of the most powerful in the documentary. “There’s Mum, rolling out the official line about being ‘Happy, proud and thrilled’. She keeps her head up and her gaze level. But as the camera focuses in on her eyes it’s like you can read her mind. You can see she is scared. You know she can’t wait for it all to be over.”

As the youngest of the Lovell children, Jeff (who has worked as a pharmaceutical sales rep for Pfizer for three decades) has only patchy ­memories of his father’s time in space. He tells me that, in 1965, his mother hid his conception from his father for fear it would derail his Nasa career. “Dad was slated to fly Gemini 7 and so she kept her pregnancy quiet for five months and tried her best not to look ­pregnant. She suspected a ‘domestic issue’ like this might get him bumped [off the mission]. But then one evening she couldn’t help getting up and going to the bathroom, which woke my Dad and he asked what was going on.”

Jeff laughs as he says: “I don’t know if this is a Hollywood line or a real one, but I think my Dad’s response was ‘Wake me up when this nightmare is over!’” In the event, when the couple told Nasa about the pregnancy, the agency’s reply was: “Marilyn, if you can handle it, then we’re moving forward.” Jeff was born two weeks after his father’s first space flight.

What does he recall of Apollo 13? “Do I remember being at the launch? No. Do I remember the media being around? Yes. Even at the age of 4 or 5 , absolutely I was aware that there were people in our house.” As well as the press and the TV cameras, the wives of the other Apollo astronauts convened at the Lovell home. “But to me, it was no different to if my dad was a police officer or a fireman: Dad was ­serving the community and a lot of people were impressed and interested. I was more interested in him bringing me back a Moon rock and I was disappointed that he didn’t!”

Jeff credits both his youth and his mother’s stoic determination to “keep things normal” for cushioning him from any fear that his father might die in space. “It just never occurred to me that he could be gone forever. But my older siblings were much more aware that we almost lost him. They had that fear.”

Susan, the third youngest of the Lovell children, later shudders as she describes her own memories of her father’s most notorious mission. “I was 11 at the time,” she says (she is now 66). The explosion that damaged Apollo 13 occurred during the night while she was asleep and her mother had called Nasa to ask how much she should tell her children in the morning. “We had these ‘squawk boxes’ all over the house,” she recalls, referring to the chunky Bakelite radios that constantly broadcast communications between the astronauts and their team at mission control.

“It was amazing and so weird to hear it all,” she says. “But I have the sense that after the explosion Mum ran all around the house turning them off, although she stayed glued to her own. We weren’t told what had happened. We went to school as usual. But then a boy came up to me and said: ‘I’m so sorry your dad’s going to die’. I said: ‘What?! My Dad’s going to die?’” She shakes her head. “He told me the TV news was giving Dad and the others a 5% chance of survival. I was so upset. I remember crying and then one of my Mum’s friends came to collect me.” After that, the Lovell children stayed at home until their father had returned to Earth.

“My older sister Barbara was 16 so she really knew what was happening,” adds Susan. “She probably ran upstairs with her Bible. We had this split-level home and there was a spot on the stairs where I could sit and watch what was happening. It was where I had sat to watch ‘Father Christmas’ deliver my toys and suddenly there I was watching the pastor from the Episcopal Church giving holy communion to all these astronauts’ wives at the coffee table.” She says this was the moment she realised the gravity of the situation. “I ran down the stairs, past all those ladies and outside to the picnic bench. Mum came out and I said, “Dad’s gonna die!” She said: “Dad’s too mean to die.” I said “Dad’s not mean!” but she explained that by ‘mean’ she meant ‘strong’. My Mum never once allowed ­herself to think he wouldn’t make it back.”

Judging by the new documentary, Marilyn certainly appears to have been made of the right stuff to handle the life of an astronaut’s wife. How did she really feel about getting propelled in front of the cameras, or rubbing shoulders with the great and the good? “She certainly enjoyed it,” says Susan. “Kings and queens and popes! She didn’t know what protocol was, she had to look around, observe and copy others. She was good at that.” In 1969, the Lovells were invited by the Nixons to the White House. “She had a great story about sneaking off with Pat Nixon [the First Lady] to the presidential suite powder room for a smoke. She also met the Queen Mother. As soon as they were behind closed doors, she asked for a beer, just like a regular person. Mum loved all that.”

"We’ve had a problem …": Astronauts from Apollo 13, Fred Haise (left), John Swigert and James Lovell (right) all in white suits, await a helicopter pickup. Photo / Getty Images

When I say that, from the outside, the Lovells appeared to be the perfect, all-American family, Susan laughs. “Oh we’re not perfect, I can tell you that!”

Up in space, Jim Lovell suspected that he and his crew mates were likely to perish in the aftermath of the explosion that famously caused Swigert to utter the astonishingly calm line: “Okay Houston, we’ve had a problem here”, shortly echoed by Lovell’s confirmation: “Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

While Jeff says that the 1995 movie is “quite accurate by Hollywood standards”, he also notes that Ron Howard used “artistic licence” when he portrayed Swigert, who died of cancer in 1982 aged just 51, as a rookie pilot out of his depth during the crisis. “As I understand it, Jack actually wrote the manual on emergency procedures in the command module,” says Jeff. “So there may have been no better person to have up there than Jack.”

He tells me that his father drew on Boy-scout training to keep calm and carry on during the crisis. “His parents had split when he was very young and then his Dad died when he was 5 . He looked to the scouting leaders as surrogate father ­figures and they had taught him to ‘be ­prepared’ and focus on solving problems instead of panicking.” Susan says her father told her that he kept his cool under those extraordinary circumstances by “treating the situation like a game of cards. He told me that ‘we just kept playing the next card and focused on that. There was never a moment when we didn’t have another card to play. If that had happened then we might have given up’.”

Although down at mission control medics told the crew to try and get some sleep during their journey back to Earth, Susan tells me that “they didn’t sleep for four days. They couldn’t. But it’s amazing their thinking didn’t get more foggy.” Both she and Jeff note the extraordinary moment captured in the new documentary when their father had to crunch the ­navigational data using only pencil and paper before asking the guys down at mission control to check his arithmetic with their own slide rules.

“It was a beautifully analogue moment, wasn’t it!” marvels Middleton. “I think there’s more processing power in the software for your mouse driver than they had in the entire Nasa mainframe for the Apollo missions.” As well as capturing the “personal drama and detail” of the Apollo 13 mission, Middleton says he hopes to remind a new generation of the bigger lessons learned during the space programme of the 1960s and 1970s. “It was a turbulent time back on Earth during those missions,” he says.

Jim Lovell in 1970. Photo / Getty Images

“The Cold War. Vietnam. But when those first astronauts went into space they saw the Earth as a finite, vulnerable source of life without borders or divisions. They all say that though they set out to find the Moon they discovered the Earth. Those missions led to the first meaningful legislation to combat biodiversity loss and pollution, issues that have only become more urgent.” Now, with the ­Artemis missions slated to take astronauts back into the Moon’s orbit next year, “we stand on the precipice of a third space age. It has never been more important to hold on to that image of the Earth in the rearview mirror.”

Both Lovell children agree. Although several astronauts – including Swigert – went into politics after leaving Nasa, the Lovells say that their father resisted offers to “get into a world which might have dragged him down, got him into the business of dividing people, although people loved him and he might have been a great leader”. After leaving the space programme, he went to Harvard Business School, worked as a motivational speaker then opened a restaurant at which his elder son, James Lovell III, manned the kitchen.

Although Jeff and Susan sigh at the burgeoning anti-science movement, Moon-landing conspiracists and growing community of Flat Earthers, they say “we have a family rule never to speak about politics”. But they both suspect that an angry world could take some lessons from the steady, logical thinking and team spirit shown by the Apollo crews.

Jeff says that his Father’s catchphrase is: “We can sit around bouncing off the walls for 10 ­minutes. But at the end of it, we’re going to be back here with the same problems. Why waste that time? Let’s get on and do what we can do while we can do it. Let’s do what we can to survive as long as possible without thinking about the end line.” He adds that when Jim was approached by ­journalists to comment on the ­Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters he also remained stoic. “He was always asked if the space programme should be stopped and he always said: ‘No. Those guys who perished knew and accepted the risks. We have to keep forging forward’.”

At 96, Jim Lovell has, says Jeff, “slowed down a lot”, but both he and his sister try to keep him active. Susan quit her job as an executive assistant to become his PA after the pandemic. Jeff – who tells me he recently signed up to be a volunteer guide at Houston’s Johnson Space Center (“I thought: I can probably bring a bit of perspective here …”) – keeps Jim busy with “little projects and outings. I took him back to his old high school recently and all his memories of meeting Mum came flooding back.”

Marilyn Lovell, the wife of Jim Lovell, Commander of the aborted Apollo 13 lunar landing mission, faces the press in 1970. Photo / Getty Images

Although Jeff has very happy childhood memories of playing with his Father’s space memorabilia – “I wore one of his jumpsuits to science fiction day at middle school and I loved flipping down all the different shades on his space helmet” – they have donated most of it to museums now.

One item Susan has hung on to is the mink coat that Jim gave to Marilyn for the 1968 Christmas he spent in space. Before blast-off, he had arranged to have the fur delivered to the door “with love from the man in the Moon”. “It’s often described as the most romantic gift in history,” she grins. “I can’t wear it now, but it would be lovely to see it on display alongside Dad’s space suit in the Adler Planetarium [in Chicago].”

As he says goodbye, Jeff reminds me of another gift that his Father gave his Mother: “He named a peak on the Moon ‘Mount Marilyn’. Neil Armstrong used it as a reference point to land on the Moon in 1969,” Jeff smiles. “Dad never made it down there himself. But we finally got the name officially recognised in 2017 … so she’s always there, right beside the Sea of Tranquility.”

Apollo 13: Survival is on Netflix from September 5