Jack R. Lousma

Jack R. Lousma, selected in NASA Astronaut Group 5 in 1966, served as the pilot on the Skylab 3 mission and the commander of the third shuttle test flight, STS-3.

Quick FActs

Lousma logged over 1,619 hours in space and orbited Earth 858 times during the Skylab 3 mission.

Lousma, on duty for his shift as a capsule communicator (CAPCOM) in Mission Control for Apollo 13, answered the call from Jack Swigert when he declared, “Okay Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

Lousma and fellow Skylab 3 astronaut Owen K. Garriott conducted a record-breaking (at the time) 6-hour 31-minute extravehicular activity (EVA) in 1973.

Jack Lousma puts on a spacesuit for training in the WETF — Astronaut Jack Lousma is wearing an Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) in the Weightless Environment Training Facility (WETF) during STS-3 mission training in 1981.
NASA

Astronaut Jack R. Lousma, Skylab 3 pilot, doing acrobatics in the Orbital Workshop — Skylab 3 pilot Jack Lousma performs zero-gravity acrobatics during the Skylab 3 mission.
NASA

Jack Lousma and Gordon Fullerton pose with a model of the Space Shuttle — Jack Lousma (right) and C. Gordon Fullerton on the day NASA announced that they would crew the STS-3 mission.
NASA

Lousma seated in the commander’s seat of space shuttle Columbia during the STS-3 mission.
NASA

Biography

Jack R. Lousma

Lousma earned a degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan, where he also played football. Selected in 1966 as a member of NASA’s Astronaut Group 5, he supported the Apollo Program for several years before traveling to space for the first time as the pilot for Skylab 3. Lousma’s NASA career continued into the Space Shuttle era. As commander of the STS-3 mission, he and pilot C. Gordon Fullerton became the first astronauts to use a space shuttle’s robotic arm (Canadarm) to move a payload in space.

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Official astronaut portrait of Jack Lousma

Astronaut Jack R. Lousma in 1971.

NASA

All Crewed Missions

Skylab 3

The second crew to inhabit Skylab, launched on July 28, 1973, spent a then record-breaking 59.5 days in space. The mission accomplished 150% of their mission goals while completing 858…

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All Crewed Missions

STS-3

Third test flight of the Space Shuttle

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Mar 30, 1982 09:04 UTC

Oral History Interviews with Jack Lousma

Jack Lousma sits at a table during training

March 7, 2001

Learn more about Jack Lousma's early years, his selection as a NASA astronaut and experiences with the Apollo and Skylab programs in this transcript from a March 7, 2001 interview undertaken as part of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

March 15, 2010

In this 2010 interview, Lousma speaks about being on the backup crew for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the unflown Skylab rescue flight, the early days of the Space Shuttle Program and his STS-3 flight.