Astronaut Jim Lovell, who guided the Apollo 13 mission safely back to Earth in 1970, has died aged 97. Nasa said he had "turned a potential tragedy into a success" after an attempt to land on the Moon was aborted because of an explosion onboard the spacecraft while it was hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.

Lovell turned a failed moon mission into a triumph of on-the-fly can-do engineering, inspiring the movie "Apollo 13," where actor Tom Hanks played Lovell, famously saying, "Houston we have a problem."

James A. “Jim” Lovell Jr., the NASA astronaut who famously led the Apollo 13 mission through a life-threatening crisis in space, died Aug. 7 at his home in Lake Forest, Ill. He was 97.