Chicago: James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 who helped turn a failed moon mission into a triumph of on-the-fly can-do engineering, has died. He was 97. 

Lovell died on Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois, Nasa said on Friday. “Jim’s character and steadfast courage helped our nation reach the moon and turned a potential tragedy into a success from which we learned an enormous amou­nt,” Nasa said. “We mourn his passing even as we celebrate his achievements.” One of Nasa’s most travelled astronauts in the agency’s first decade, Lovell flew four times — Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 — with the two Apollo flights riveting the folks back on Earth.

In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders was the first to leave Earth’s orbit and the first to fly to and circle the moon. They could not land, but they put the US ahead of the Soviets in the space race.

Letter writers told the crew their stunning pale blue dot photo of Earth from the moon, a world first, and the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis saved America from a tumultuous 1968.

But the big rescue mission was still to come. That was during the Apollo 13 flight in April 1970. Lovell was supposed to be the 5th man to walk on the moon. But Apollo 13’s service module, carrying Lovell and 2 others, experienced an oxygen tank blast on its way to the moon. The ast­ronauts barely survived. —AP