ABOVE AND BEYOND

Tom Hanks Pays Tribute to Late Astronaut He Helped Make Famous

“Godspeed you, on this next voyage,” wrote the actor, who portrayed Jim Lovell in “Apollo 13.”

Tom Hanks, who starred as astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, honored the space pioneer in an Instagram post Friday hours after Lovell died at 97. “There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own,” Hanks posted. “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.” Hanks portrayed Lovell in the Oscar-winning film in 1995, which told the story of the brave astronauts on the ill-fated mission to the moon. While on board 200,000 miles from Earth, an explosion depleted the spacecraft’s oxygen supply, forcing Lovell to alert the ground crew: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” After the explosion, the craft looped around the moon and landed safely in the Pacific. Lovell himself made a brief cameo in the movie as the captain of the ship that recovered the Apollo 13 crew after it came down. 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—and who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages?” Hanks wrote. “Godspeed you, on this next voyage, Jim Lovell.”