Alan Bean

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan LaVern Bean was born on the 15th of March, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, a small town in the northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle. He died on the 26th of May, 2018, at the age of 86. Between those two dates, he became only the fourth human being to walk on the Moon. Then he did something no one before him had ever done: he went back to that Moon with a paintbrush.

  He flew 250,000 miles to the Ocean of Storms. He salvaged a mission struck by lightning 36 seconds after launch. He commanded a crew that stayed in space for 59 days and covered more than 24 million miles. Then he walked away from NASA entirely, resigned his post, and spent the rest of his life trying to paint what he had seen.

  How does a test pilot from Fort Worth become the only artist in history to have visited another world? What did he find on the Moon that he felt compelled to carry back in pigment and canvas? And what exactly was the lost photograph that haunted him enough to paint it twice? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. From Wheeler to the Navy

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  Wheeler County, Texas, where Bean grew up, sits at the eastern edge of the Texas Panhandle. His father, Arnold Horace Bean, worked for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, and the family moved to Minden, Louisiana, the seat of Webster Parish, while Bean was young. Fort Worth was the city he would always call home, and he graduated from R. L. Paschal High School there in 1949.

  Within days of finishing high school, Bean enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He had earned the rank of First Class Scout in the Boy Scouts. Both of those early commitments point to the same pattern: he moved from one structured challenge to the next without pausing to look back.

  At the University of Texas at Austin, Bean attended on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, joining Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity along the way. He graduated in 1955 with a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering. That same year, on the 19th of April, he married Sue Ragsdale, a fellow graduate. He was commissioned a U.S. Navy ensign through the NROTC program at Austin in January of that year.

  After completing flight training in June 1956, he was assigned to Attack Squadron 44 at NAS Jacksonville, Florida, flying the F9F Cougar and then the A4D Skyhawk. He was a fighter pilot for four years before the next door opened.

• 3. The Test Pilot Years

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  In November 1960, Bean graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland. His instructor there was a naval aviator named Pete Conrad. Neither man knew that this classroom relationship would lead them both to the Moon.

  At Patuxent River, Bean also took art classes at nearby St. Mary's College of Maryland. It was an unusual combination for a test pilot, but Bean never saw art and engineering as opposites. He was curious about both, and the school let him pursue both.

  By the time he left the test pilot program, Bean had logged more than 7,145 total hours of flying time, including 4,890 hours in jet aircraft. He was assigned to Navy Attack Squadron VA-172 at NAS Cecil Field, Florida, flying A-4 Skyhawks, when NASA came calling.

  Bean had applied for NASA's second astronaut group and was not selected. He applied again for the third group and made the cut in 1963. The rejection the first time around did not stop him from trying again, a pattern that would repeat itself more than once before he ever left Earth's atmosphere.

• 4. Lightning Over the Ocean of Storms

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  Apollo 12 launched in November 1969. Thirty-six seconds after liftoff, lightning struck the spacecraft. Telemetry failed. Inside mission control, a young flight controller named John Aaron recognized the data dropout from a simulation he had run months earlier. He called up to the flight director: "Flight, try SCE to 'Aux'." Bean was the astronaut who heard that instruction, found the obscure switch, and executed it. The mission was saved.

  Bean and commander Pete Conrad landed on the Moon's Ocean of Storms after a 250,000-mile journey. Conrad had been Bean's instructor at the naval test pilot school, and had personally requested Bean for the crew after fellow astronaut Clifton Williams was killed in an air crash. That request opened the slot Bean had been waiting for.

  On the lunar surface, the two men deployed experiments, installed the first nuclear power generator on the Moon, and spent over seven hours walking in two separate excursions. Dick Gordon orbited above them, photographing potential landing sites for future missions.

  Bean's suit from that mission is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum. He also carried a piece of Clan MacBean tartan fabric to the surface and back, later giving portions of it to the Clan McBean and to the St Bean Chapel in Scotland.

• 5. The Photo That Was Never Taken

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  Near the Surveyor III spacecraft on the lunar surface, Bean had a plan. He wanted to use a self-timer on his Hasselblad camera to photograph both himself and Pete Conrad standing together on the Moon. No one had managed a picture like that. Bean also had a secondary motive: he hoped the image would confuse mission scientists, who would struggle to explain how a photo with both astronauts in the frame had been taken.

  Neither he nor Conrad could find the timer in the tool carrier tote bag while they were at the Surveyor III site. They searched and gave up. When the EVA ended and they were preparing to leave, Bean found the timer at last. It was too late to use. He threw it as far as he could across the lunar surface.

  The incident stayed with him for the rest of his life. Years later, Bean painted it twice: once as The Fabulous Photo We Never Took, imagining the photograph that could have existed, and once as Our Little Secret, showing the fruitless search for the timer at Surveyor III. Both paintings are part of his Apollo collection.

  The lost timer is a small story inside a large mission, but it captures something essential about Bean: he went to the Moon with the instincts of both an engineer and an artist, and neither impulse ever fully overtook the other.

• 6. Skylab and Departure

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  On the 29th of July, 1973, Bean launched as spacecraft commander of Skylab 3, the second crewed visit to America's first space station. His crewmates were scientist-astronaut Owen Garriott and Marine Corps Colonel Jack R. Lousma. They stayed aboard for 59 days, from late July to the 25th of September.

  During those 59 days, the crew covered a world-record 24.4 million miles. They accomplished 150 percent of their assigned mission goals. Bean tested a prototype of the Manned Maneuvering Unit and performed one spacewalk outside the station. It was the most productive crew visit Skylab would receive.

  After Skylab 3, Bean served as backup spacecraft commander for the American crew on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the joint American-Russian mission. He retired from the Navy in October 1975 as a captain, then remained at NASA as a civilian, running the Astronaut Candidate Operations and Training Group.

  By the time he resigned from NASA in June 1981, Bean had logged 1,671 hours and 45 minutes in space, of which 10 hours and 26 minutes were spent in spacewalks on the Moon and in Earth orbit. He had also, quietly, been taking art seriously for years. His resignation letter was a declaration of intent: he was leaving to paint full time.

• 7. Painting the Moon

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  Bean had a problem he described in his own words: "I had to figure out a way to add color to the Moon without ruining it." The Moon he had walked on was mostly gray. But as a painter, he said, "I can add colors to the Moon."

  The textures in his paintings came from unusual sources. When he began work, Bean noticed that the keepsake patches from his space suit were embedded with Moon dust. He began pressing tiny pieces of those patches into his canvases, embedding actual lunar material in the surface of each painting. He also used the hammer he had carried to pound the flagpole into the lunar soil, and a bronzed Moon boot, as texture tools.

  His paintings include works titled Lunar Grand Prix and Rock and Roll on the Ocean of Storms. In July 2009, for the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Bean exhibited his lunar paintings at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He had his own clear idea of why no one else could do what he was doing. "I'm the only one who can paint the Moon," he said, "because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not."

  In 2019, Northrop Grumman named the cargo spacecraft for the NG-12 resupply mission the S.S. Alan Bean, a tribute that would have amused a man who once threw a camera timer into the dust of the Ocean of Storms.