"A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth." -- John Singer Sargent

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Jim Lovell



This 1968 portrait of Apollo-8 astronauts William Anders, Frank Borman, and James Lovell by Hector Garrido appeared in an exhibition on the year 1968 at the National Portrait Gallery.
The year 1968 was marked by rioting in the nation's black ghettos and mounting protests over the war in Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated, and there had been a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. But as Time pointed out in its year-end summary, 1968 closed with an event that was bound to overshadow these other happenings. In late December, three astronauts (left to right)—William Anders (born 1933), Frank Borman (born 1928), and James Lovell (born 1928)—had embarked on the first successful human orbit of the moon, and on Christmas Eve, the trio reported live from their Apollo 8 spacecraft. The full implication of this achievement could not yet be understood, Nevertheless, Time could not help but conclude that of all the people who had made news in those past twelve months, Anders, Borman, and Lovell were the right choice for 1968's Men of the Year. -- NPG
 Wikipedia gives this short biography of Jim Lovell:

James Arthur Lovell Jr. (born March 25, 1928) is a former NASA astronaut, Naval Aviator, mechanical engineer, and retired Navy captain. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he became one of the first three humans to fly to and orbit the Moon. He then commanded the 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission which, after a critical failure en route, circled around the Moon and returned safely to Earth through the efforts of the crew and mission control.
Lovell had previously flown on two Gemini missions, Gemini 7 in 1965 and Gemini 12 in 1966. He was the first person to fly into space four times.
One of 24 people to have flown to the Moon, Lovell was the first person to fly to it twice. He is a recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (in 1970, as one of 17 recipients in the Space Exploration group),[1] and co-author of the 1994 book Lost Moon, on which the 1995 film Apollo 13 was based.

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