Friday, December 27, 2019

FRIDAY HALL OF FAMERS, 12/27/2019 - JIM LOVELL



Today marks the 51st anniversary of the splashdown of Apollo 8, with crewmembers Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders.   But of them all, it’s Lovell who’s getting inducted into the Television Crossover Hall of Fame as a member of the League of Themselves.  And this being December, he’s being inducted as a multiversal character, which includes a different actor playing him.

From Wikipedia:
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), and co-author of the 1994 book Lost Moon, on which the 1995 film Apollo 13 was based.

Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and the first to reach the Moon, orbit it, and return.[1][2][3] Its three-astronaut crew—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to fly to the Moon, to witness and photograph an Earthrise, and to escape the gravity of a celestial body.

Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968, and was the second crewed spaceflight mission flown in the United States Apollo space program after Apollo 7, which stayed in Earth orbit. Apollo 8 was the third flight and the first crewed launch of the Saturn V rocket, and was the first human spaceflight from the Kennedy Space Center, located adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Originally planned as the second crewed Apollo Lunar Module and command module test, to be flown in an elliptical medium Earth orbit in early 1969, the mission profile was changed in August 1968 to a more ambitious command-module-only lunar orbital flight to be flown in December, as the lunar module was not yet ready to make its first flight. Astronaut Jim McDivitt's crew, who were training to fly the first lunar module flight in low Earth orbit, became the crew for the Apollo 9 mission, and Borman's crew were moved to the Apollo 8 mission. This left Borman's crew with two to three months' less training and preparation time than originally planned, and replaced the planned lunar module training with translunar navigation training.

Apollo 8 took 68 hours (almost three days) to travel the distance to the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times over the course of twenty hours, during which they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which they read the first ten verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. president John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when their spacecraft splashed down in the northern Pacific Ocean. The crew members were named Time magazine's "Men of the Year" for 1968 upon their return.


Jim Lovell is being inducted as a member of the League of Themselves and a Multiversal.

These are the appearancces which qualify him for membership:


LateLine
- Al Anonymous (1998)
... Himself

Mars
- Grounded (2016)
... Himself
O’Bservation: As this took place in the 2030s, Lovell was seen in archival footage.

In 1998, actor Tim Daly portrayed Lovell in portions of the HBO miniseries ‘From the Earth to the Moon’. The film depicts Lovell during his missions aboard Gemini 12, Apollo 8, and Apollo 13, though he is not seen on screen during the latter mission.
 -  Can We Do This? (1998) ... Jim Lovell
  - 1968 (199-8) ... Jim Lovell
  - For Miles and Miles (1998) ... Jim Lovell
  - The Original Wives Club (1998) ... Jim Lovell


And as flavoring for his tally, we could give this movie appearance consideration:

The Man Who Fell to Earth
Himself (Commander of Apollo 13)

Welcome to the Hall, Mr Lovell…..

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