Tom Hanks Pays Tribute to Apollo 13 Astronaut Jim Lovell: Godspeed on This Next Voyage

Tom Hanks has honored the late Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, whom he portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie "Apollo 13."

Lovell died Thursday at age 97 in Lake Forest, Illinois, according to The Guardian. Social media has since been flooded with tributes, with Hanks taking the lead. 

"There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own," he wrote in an Instagram post of Lovell after the astronaut's death was announced on Friday. "Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy."

The 1995 film "Apollo 13," directed by Ron Howard, earned Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound while telling the story of the ill-fated 1970 lunar mission that almost ended in tragedy for Lovell and his crew. The mission was planned as NASA's third manned moon landing.

However, about 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank exploded in the service module. With critical systems damaged, the crew had to abandon their moon landing and instead used engine burns to return safely to Earth, completing what became known as the Apollo program's "successful failure."

"His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive," Hanks wrote Friday of Lovell. "And who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages."

"On this night of a full Moon, he passes on — to the heavens, to the cosmos, to the stars. Godspeed you, on this next voyage, Jim Lovell."

Lovell went on to receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But, according to the AP, he often said the real reward was the "respect and gratitude of the American people" and always remembered that, when crises struck, "I could have been gone back in 1970 … I'm still here."

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