Captain James A. Lovell Jr., an astronaut best known for Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the moon, and Apollo 13, an engineering feat that beat the odds, died on August 7, 2025, in Lake Forest, Illinois. He was 97 years old.Lovell was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1928. His father died in a car accident when he was four, and Lovell grew up moving around the Midwest. In 1952, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, and in 1958 he entered a six-month training course to become a test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center, in Maryland, where he graduated at the top of his class. “In those days, jet training was, you know, the epitome of everything,” he told the NASA…