The Earth Behind a Man’s Thumb

There followed four harrowing days of seat-of-the-pants flying with NASA engineers radioing instructions and suggestions.

As we all know, Lovell and his crew of Fred Haise Jr. and John L. Swigert Jr. made it back.

Lovell says that very close call changed him. "I live my life one day at a time now. Nothing rattles me."

He's been married for almost sixty years to his college sweetheart, Marilyn, and they have four grown children, two daughters and two sons. He is a partner with one of his sons in a restaurant in Lake Forest, Illinois. Lovell likes to visit with patrons and answer questions about the space memorabilia on display.

When he's at the family cabin on a lake north of Chicago on a summer night, Jim Lovell will look up at a full moon and remember Christmas Eve, 1968. "When you see Earth from the moon," he says, "you realize how fragile it is and just how limited the resources are. We're all astronauts on this spaceship Earth—about six or seven billion of us—and we have to work and live together."

Stewart Brand placed that shot of Earth on the front and back cover of the Whole Earth Catalog with the inscription, "We can't put it together. It is together."