To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the onboard explosion that nearly doomed James Lovell to an unpleasant death far from home, the retired astronaut showed up at the Adler Planetarium on Wednesday bearing gifts.
Artifacts that played crucial roles in getting Lovell and his Apollo 13 crewmates safely back to Earth will join the planetarium’s permanent collection thanks to Lovell, whose exploits were immortalized in the 1995 film “Apollo 13.”
May 12 marks the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Adler, the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, and Lovell, chairman of the anniversary celebration, said he thought the lakefront museum was a fitting home for the mementos of his storied career in space.
On Wednesday, Lovell, 77, delivered the first of those artifacts, Apollo 13’s onboard emergency contingency handbook, missing only its cardboard cover.
As fans of the movie would recognize, the handbook cover became a part of a makeshift air purifier the astronauts had to cobble together with duct tape, plastic and a wool sock to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
“If it hadn’t worked, we would have been poisoned by our own exhalation,” he said.
Lovell told of hearing a loud bang aboard the spacecraft as it headed to the moon on April 13, 1970.
“We had just finished a live television broadcast back to Earth,” Lovell said. “I had shut off the television camera and was coming down the tunnel between the lunar module and the spacecraft when I heard the bang.
“At first we thought it was a meteor strike. … When we realized that it wasn’t a meteor, we very quickly got busy figuring out what did happen and how we could get back home.”
Before jettisoning the lunar landing module as the spaceship headed back to Earth, Lovell grabbed two items that would have been left on the moon’s surface if the mission hadn’t been aborted: a small navigational telescope and a brass plaque inscribed with his name and those of crewmates John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr.
The telescope, plaque and other mementos from three other space flights Lovell made, including the Earth-orbiting Gemini 7 and Gemini 12 missions in 1965 and 1966, and the Christmastime moon orbit of Apollo 8 in 1968, all will eventually go to the Adler.
Besides Lovell’s personal mementos, Adler president Paul Knappenberger announced two other major pieces being added to the planetarium collection.
One is the two-man Gemini 12 spacecraft Lovell flew in with Buzz Aldrin, a flight in which the spaceship docked with another spacecraft, an orbiting Agena rocket (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
It will come to the planetarium on long-term loan from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum next fall.
Also on its way is a 7-foot bronze statue by sculptors Omri Amrany and Julie Rotblatt-Amrany, whom the Adler commissioned to do a lifelike rendering of Lovell in his spacesuit.
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Edited by Patrick Olsen (polsen@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
