CULTURE

The Earth Behind a Man’s Thumb

The first orbit of the moon reminded us of life's fragility. In a new book, the author of 'The Greatest Generation' looks at how a year ended, and a new age began.

MULTIMEDIA

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Flashback
Forty years later, these photographs still resonate

My Father, the Activist
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By Tom Brokaw | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Nov 19, 2007

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There was at the end of 1968 an event that remains an inspirational symbol for the challenges ahead. For the Sixties were also the glory years of the American space program, and of astronauts such as Captain Jim Lovell. Lovell, who will be eighty in 2008, retains the boyish enthusiasm of an Eagle Scout, an award he earned growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the Depression, the son of a single mother. His father had died, and times were not easy for the Lovells. "We had a one-room apartment with a Murphy bed that came out of the wall," he remembers.

The young Lovell was fascinated with rocket science. He'd read Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" at thirteen and he began building and launching some primitive backyard rockets a few hundred feet into the air.

When he realized his family couldn't afford to send him to the big-time science institutions such as Cal Tech or MIT, he applied to the U.S. Naval Academy. He was rejected on the first pass but got in after two years at the University of Wisconsin.

When he graduated from Annapolis in 1952, he became a Navy fighter pilot and then a test pilot. By 1959 NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—was looking for seven pilots with the Right Stuff, in Tom Wolfe's enduring phrase about the first astronauts. Lovell was among the thirty-four military pilots considered, but he was rejected because he had a rare blood-pigmentation condition; it wasn't life-threatening, but it took him out of the running.

He was disappointed but not discouraged. He wrote in his diary, "There will be other space projects and who knows, I might be part of them … We learn through failure."

Three years later he was selected for the second group of astronauts. In 1965 and again in 1966 he went into space aboard a Gemini module, spending almost three weeks orbiting the earth.