Tom Hanks, who portrayed Jim Lovell in ‘Apollo 13,’ pays tribute to the late astronaut

Kevin Bacon, Tom Hanks, and Bill Paxton are seen during a scene from the 1995 film 'Apollo 13'. Hanks is honoring the real-life hero that he once portrayed in a popular, Oscar-winning film. (Universal Pictures/Moviepix/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Tom Hanks is honoring the real-life hero that he once portrayed in a popular, Oscar-winning film.

After the death of astronaut Jim Lovell was announced on Friday, Hanks shared a poignant social media post to his Instagram, writing, “There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own.”

“Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy,” Hanks added in the post.

The actor portrayed Lovell in the 1995 Ron Howard-directed film “Apollo 13,” which told the story of Lovell’s failed lunar space mission which almost cost him and his crew their lives in 1970.

Apollo 13 would have marked NASA’s third successful crewed moon landing, but during the ill-fated mission – which carried Lovell as well as astronauts John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. on board – an oxygen tank located on the crew’s service module exploded when they were about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometres) away from Earth.

Lovell famously delivered the news to mission control, saying “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” The exchange was later immortalized by Hanks in the “Apollo 13” movie, which costarred Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan and the late Bill Paxton.

With the damage effectively taking out their power source and other life support supplies, the Apollo 13 crew had to abruptly abandon their trek to the lunar surface and use several engine burns to swing around the far side of the moon and put themselves on a course back toward Earth.

The three-person crew made a high-stakes splashdown return in the South Pacific Ocean about three days after the tank explosion, marking the conclusion of what has come to be known as the “successful failure” of the Apollo missions.

“His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive – and who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages,” Hanks wrote in his tribute on Friday.

Lovell died at age 97 on Thursday in Lake Forest, Illinois, according to a NASA news release, CNN previously reported. The cause of death was not immediately clear.

He made a brief cameo in the movie as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the Navy ship that recovered the Apollo 13 crew after splashdown.

“Apollo 13” was nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture, and won two, for best film editing and best sound.

By Jackie Wattles, Ashley Strickland.