Now he and his father were business partners. Their restaurant, "Lovell's Lake Forest Inn" opened in the fall of 1998, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the flight of Apollo 8. In it the Lovell family showcases Jim Lovell's space career and Jay Lovell's cooking talents. "This restaurant will be open for as long as I am alive," says Jay.
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For Jim Lovell, the flight of Apollo 8 made remarkably little difference to his life. As soon as the parades and parties ended, Jim returned to the program. Why stop now, after getting within seventy miles of the moon's surface? he thought. He became a backup to Apollo 11, which put him in the ideal position to get the assignment as commander for Apollo 13, scheduled to land on the moon sometime in the next two years. He would then become the fifth man to walk on the surface of another world.
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Unfortunately, halfway to the moon Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded. To get the men home alive and unharmed demanded tremendous patience and technical skill, both by the astronauts themselves and their colleagues at NASA.
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This meant, however, that Jim Lovell would never walk on the moon. In the 1970's the American space program was dying, and Jim could see that it might be years, if ever, that he would fly into space again. He decided it was time to leave NASA and try his hand in private enterprise. He went looking for something new to do with his life.
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For four years he was president of a tugboat business in the Houston area. Then he became president of a telecommunications firm, selling business phone systems in the Southwest. Later, he was executive vice president for Cintol Corporation, which had purchased his Houston company. He and Marilyn moved back to the Midwest where they both had grown up, and built a home in the suburbs north of Chicago. As the years passed, the Lovells faded into the pleasant but obscure life of middle America. Once in a while a reporter would call to ask them about Jim's Apollo missions, but in general it seemed the country had lost interest in space. Jim and Marilyn watched their children grow up and go out on their own, becoming ordinary Americans in the never-ending, always changing American landscape.
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Finally, Jim decided to sit down with writer Jeffrey Kluger and write Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 . Even if he couldn't fly again,
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