Recently, yet another Apollo astronaut, Jim Lovell, passed on. Lovell’s fame was as defined by his role as a pop culture icon as it was by his astronaut heroics.

Everybody who came of age during the Apollo race to the moon knows the name of Captain Jim Lovell. He flew on the missions of Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.

Apollo 8 was the first crewed orbit of the moon, which featured the famous Christmas Eve 1968 reading from the book of Genesis as the Earth rose over the surface of the moon. The mission, the first beyond low Earth orbit, provided a beautiful cap to what was otherwise a horrible year.

But Lovell is most famous for being the commander of Apollo 13, the 1970 mission meant to land on the moon, but which instead became a harrowing drama, thanks to an explosion in the Apollo spacecraft service module, in which the crew may not have made it back alive.

That they did was a great credit to Lovell, the other two crewmen of Apollo 13, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, and the people in Mission Control in Houston.

Twenty-five years later, it was only natural that Ron Howard chose the Apollo 13 mission as a subject to put to film about space exploration.

The movie starred Tom Hanks as Lovell and featured Lovell himself in a cameo appearance as a Navy admiral. The mission had all the drama that a movie could........

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