Tom Hanks bids farewell to Jim Lovell signing off with a moonlit homage

10 August 2025

Tom Hanks, as Jim Lovell, in a scene from Apollo 13. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Tom Hanks took to Instagram to share a deeply moving tribute to Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell following news of his passing at the age of ninety-seven, and in his message Hanks honored Lovell’s extraordinary journey as a pioneer who traveled farther into space and stayed aloft longer than anyone else in history, a man who dared to dream and led us to places most of us would never go.

The actor who portrayed Lovell in the Oscar-winning 1995 film Apollo 13 reflected on the true nature of Lovell’s voyages as being motivated not by fame or reward but by the living impulse to meet formidable challenges, and he described Lovell’s many missions not as quests for celebrity but as the essence of human vitality.

In his post Hanks wrote that on a night graced by a full moon Lovell now embarks on his final voyage to the heavens to the cosmos to the stars and he closed with a heartfelt God speed you on this next voyage--Jim Lovell. Hanks’ portrayal of Lovell in Ron Howard’s film immortalized the line Houston we have a problem which echoes the real words Houston we’ve had a problem uttered by Lovell himself during the Apollo 13 crisis when an oxygen tank exploded two hundred thousand miles from Earth and the crew were forced to abandon their lunar landing and figure out how to return home.

The film went on to win Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound and received nine Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Lovell later made a brief, understated cameo in the movie as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the naval vessel that recovered the crew after splashdown in the South Pacific about three days after the explosion.

The dramatic events of Apollo 13 became one of NASA’s most famous missions immortalized as a successful failure and for Hanks that story was about resilience and about exploration that goes beyond the superficial and into the core of what moves us. In his tribute Hanks captured Lovell’s legacy as a man whose service in space was grounded not in accolades but in the defining human drive to explore the unknown.

NASA announced Lovell’s passing in Lake Forest, Illinois on Thursday evening but did not immediately release a cause of death. The actor’s words reminded readers that while Apollo 13 was a film it was also a reminder of real courage and resourcefulness that saved lives in the void of space. Hanks reflected that Lovell’s travels were the kind of challenge that fuels the course of being alive and that Lovell’s willingness to venture farther than most of us could imagine offers a lesson for us all. He framed it as a voyage not ending but continuing in the heavens.

The legacy of Jim Lovell lives on not only in cinematic memory or in NASA’s records but in the sentiment that exploration matters and that those who dare are worth remembering. In closing Hanks offered a poetic farewell conveying that on this night of a full moon Lovell passes on to the heavens to the stars, God speed you on this next voyage, Jim Lovell. Category note U.S. culture and space exploration.