Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alan Bean was an American naval aviator, test pilot, and NASA astronaut who became the fourth person to walk on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission in November 1969. He and commander Pete Conrad landed on the Moon's Ocean of Storms, spent over seven hours on the lunar surface across two excursions, deployed experiments, and installed the first nuclear power generator on the Moon.
Lightning struck Apollo 12 thirty-six seconds after launch, knocking out telemetry. Flight controller John Aaron identified the failure and called up the instruction to switch the Signal Conditioning Equipment to auxiliary mode. Bean was the astronaut who located and executed that switch, restoring the spacecraft's data feed and salvaging the mission.
Bean resigned from NASA in June 1981 to paint full time. He stated that in his eighteen years as an astronaut he had visited worlds and seen sights no artist had ever witnessed firsthand, and he wanted to express those experiences through painting. He believed he was uniquely qualified to depict the Moon accurately because he had been there.
Bean embedded tiny pieces of keepsake patches from his space suit into his canvases; those patches carried real Moon dust. He also used the hammer he had used on the lunar surface to pound the flagpole, and a bronzed Moon boot, as texture tools to create the surface of his paintings.
Bean commanded Skylab 3, the second crewed mission to the Skylab space station, from the 29th of July to the 25th of September, 1973. His crew of three, which included Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma, spent 59 days aboard, covered a world-record 24.4 million miles, and accomplished 150 percent of their assigned mission goals.
Alan Bean died on the 26th of May, 2018, in Houston, Texas, at the age of 86. His death followed the sudden onset of illness two weeks earlier while he was in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was interred at Arlington National Cemetery on the 8th of November, 2018.