American astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission who dramatically brought the crew back to Earth

Money was tight, so he applied for, and was accepted on, the navy’s Holloway plan, which gave him two years of a free engineering course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, plus flight training, sea duty and a commission. After two years it also led a senior officer to suggest to Lovell that he should renew his application to Annapolis. He was accepted, wrote his thesis on liquid fuelled rocketry, graduated in 1952, and soon afterwards married his childhood sweetheart, Marilyn Gerlach.