Astronaut Jim Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 mission and co-author of the famous phrase “Houston, we have a problem,” has died at 97.

Space.com is paying tribute to the man “who helped turn the Apollo 13 lunar mission from near disaster to a model of ingenuity and survival” : Jim Lovell, 97, died Thursday, August 7, in Lake Forest, Illinois, officials at NASA, the U.S. space agency, announced Friday, August 8. Lovell, then a naval pilot, “joined NASA in September 1962, in the agency’s second-ever astronaut class,” Space.com recalls, citing among his classmates Neil Armstrong, a member of the first crew to walk on the Moon, and Ed White, the first American to walk in space.

In April 1970, he was part of the crew of Apollo 13, his fourth mission—a record at the time—to the Moon. Along with lunar module pilot Fred Haise, they were to become the fifth and sixth people to set foot on Earth's satellite. “They were to explore a site called Fra Mauro, a high plateau whose topography could provide valuable information on lunar geology,” reports the New York Times . But after “an oxygen tank exploded in the command and service module,” the three astronauts had to abandon their objective and “switched to survival mode,” explains Space.com . After “converting their lunar module Aquarius into a lifeboat,” in the words of NASA officials, they managed to return to Earth.

Jim Lovell recounted this exceptional mission in 1994 in his book Apollo 13: Lost in Space (Robert Laffont, 1995), co-written with science journalist Jeffrey Kruger, on which Ron Howard's film Apollo 13 (1995) was based, which popularized Lovell's phrase: "Houston, we've had a problem." Tom Hanks inherited Lovell's role, alongside Bill Paxton (Haise) and Kevin Bacon (Jack Swigert, the pilot of the pilot module). " There are people who dare, who dream and who lead others to places they wouldn't go alone. Jim Lovell [ ...] was one of them," Tom Hanks reacted Friday in a message on Instagram.

Hollywood news site Deadline explains that while “the film was praised for its faithfulness to reality,” it “took some liberties with the famous line. While the film shows Lovell, played by Hanks, as the first to utter the statement, it was Swigert who actually said it first. After Swigert’s initial ‘OK, Houston, we have a problem,’ mission control asked the crew to repeat, and Lovell then said, ‘Ah, Houston, we have a problem.’”

In total, Lovell logged 715 hours of space flight time, “more than any astronaut in the pioneering Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, created by the United States as part of its race to put a man on the Moon with the Soviet Union,” according to the New York Times . But the newspaper points out: “Captain Lovell never realized his dream of reaching the lunar surface.”