Apollo 12

• 1. Introduction

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  Apollo 12 launched into a sky that had no business sending anyone to the Moon. On the 14th of November 1969, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, rain fell steadily and clouds sealed the horizon. President Richard Nixon stood watching as the Saturn V rose through the overcast, the first sitting U.S. president ever to witness a crewed space launch. Thirty-six and a half seconds after liftoff, the rocket was struck by lightning. Then struck again, at 52 seconds. Every warning light on the astronauts' panel lit up red at once. Mission Control's data stream became garbled noise. The spacecraft was running on batteries that could not meet its power demands. It was not obvious, in that moment, that Apollo 12 would survive the next hour, let alone reach the Moon. Yet five days later, Commander Pete Conrad would land his lunar module within 535 feet of a specific robotic probe that had been sitting on the lunar surface since 1967. The questions worth asking about Apollo 12 are not whether it succeeded. It did. The questions are how a crew saved their own mission in the first two minutes of flight, how a cartographer named Ewen Whitaker found a needle in the moon's vast haystack, and what the mission revealed about the Moon that nobody had expected.

• 2. Lightning and the Man Who Knew

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  John Aaron was working as the Electrical, Environmental and Consumables Manager in Mission Control when the telemetry stream collapsed into garbage. He recognized the failure pattern. Months earlier, during a ground test, a power loss had caused a malfunction in the CSM signal conditioning electronics, the system that converted raw instrumentation into readable displays. Aaron had seen this exact signature before. He called out to Flight Director Gerald Griffin: "Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux." The switch was obscure enough that Griffin did not know what it was. CAPCOM Gerald Carr did not know. Conrad, the commander, did not know. Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean knew. As the spacecraft's engineer, Bean had memorized the location of every switch, and he threw it. The telemetry came back online, showing no significant malfunctions. Bean then put the three fuel cells back online, and the mission continued. The lightning strikes had knocked the "8-ball" attitude indicator offline at 52 seconds, but had never touched the Saturn V's independent guidance system, which had kept the rocket flying normally throughout. One further anxiety lingered: engineers feared the lightning might have damaged the explosive bolts that would open the parachute compartment on reentry. The decision was made not to tell the crew. If the parachutes failed, an abort would not save them; there was nothing to be gained by raising the alarm. The parachutes deployed normally on November 24, ending the mission without incident.

• 3. The Cartographer's Search

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  Ewen Whitaker had already done something NASA found difficult when he pinpointed the landing site of the Surveyor 1 probe with greater accuracy than the agency itself had managed. Now NASA invited him to locate Surveyor 3, the probe that had landed on the Moon on the 20th of April 1967. The stakes were real: Apollo Program Manager Samuel Phillips had designated Surveyor crater as Apollo 12's landing site on the 25th of July 1969, over the unanimous opposition of two site selection boards, whose members feared the astronauts would land too far from the probe to reach it. Apollo 11 had overshot its target by several miles. Whitaker worked with photographs, studying images taken by Surveyor 3 itself and comparing them against photographs of thousands of similar craters examined under a microscope. He found two specific rocks near the probe. Those rocks allowed him to identify the probe's precise location. Conrad trained with that knowledge, expecting to see a cluster of craters he nicknamed "the Snowman" with Surveyor crater at its center. During the powered descent, at the moment the craft pitched over to give the crew a view of the surface, Conrad was astonished to find the Snowman exactly where he expected it. He took manual control, aiming for an area he had named "Pete's Parking Lot" in simulations, found the ground rougher than expected, maneuvered, and landed at 06:54:36 UTC on the 19th of November 1969. The distance to Surveyor 3: 535 feet.

• 4. A Crew Built by Tragedy

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  Clifton C. Williams Jr. was supposed to fly to the Moon on Apollo 12. He was killed in October 1967 when the T-38 jet he was piloting crashed near Tallahassee. His death set in motion a chain of personal loyalties that shaped the crew. Pete Conrad had wanted Alan Bean for the mission from the start, but Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations, had told him Bean was unavailable, committed to the Apollo Applications Program. After Williams died, Conrad asked for Bean again. This time Slayton agreed. Bean, 37 years old when the mission flew, had graduated from the University of Texas in 1955 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He had been a student of Conrad's at the Naval Test Pilot School and had never flown in space before Apollo 12. Richard Gordon, Command Module Pilot and 40 years old at the time, had flown with Conrad on Gemini 11. Both men had graduated from test pilot school at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. All three Apollo 12 crew members were U.S. Navy commanders, a fact reflected in every detail of the mission, from the call signs they chose for the spacecraft to the clipper ship on the mission patch. A fourth star appears on that patch, placed there at Bean's suggestion, representing Williams, the man who would have stood in Bean's place.

• 5. Science on the Surface

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  Apollo 12 was the first mission to carry a full Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, known as the ALSEP. The Apollo 11 crew had carried a smaller, simpler precursor set. The ALSEP on Apollo 12 included a seismometer, a magnetometer to measure the Moon's surface magnetic field, detectors for the thin lunar atmosphere and its charged particles, a solar wind spectrometer, and a dust detector. Power came from SNAP-27, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator built by the Atomic Energy Commission and fueled by plutonium. It was the first use of atomic energy on a crewed NASA spacecraft. Bean had trouble extracting the plutonium fuel element from its protective cask during deployment and eventually used a hammer to dislodge it. The ALSEP station was activated from Earth on the 19th of November 1969, and its experiments ran for years. The Lunar Surface Magnetometer was deactivated on the 14th of June 1974. All remaining powered ALSEP experiments across all Apollo missions were shut down on the 30th of September 1977, primarily due to budget constraints. The seismometer offered an immediate dividend during the mission itself: after the astronauts returned to lunar orbit, controllers on Earth directed the Lunar Module's ascent stage to crash into the Moon at a point 39 nautical miles from the landing site. The resulting impact registered on the seismometer for more than an hour, producing data about the Moon's interior structure.

• 6. Two Walks and a Bet

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  Conrad was the shortest man among the first groups of astronauts selected by NASA. His first words on the lunar surface were: "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me." The remark was not improvised. Conrad had made a bet with journalist Oriana Fallaci, who had asked him whether NASA had scripted Neil Armstrong's famous words. Conrad promised Fallaci he would say whatever he chose and named his price. He later acknowledged he was never able to collect. The two moonwalks together covered significant ground. During the second EVA, which lasted 3 hours, 49 minutes and 15 seconds, Conrad and Bean traveled 4,300 feet and went as far as 1,350 feet from the lunar module. They visited Head crater, Bench crater, Sharp crater, Halo crater, and finally Surveyor crater. At Head crater, Bean noticed that Conrad's footprints showed lighter material beneath the surface, an indication of ejecta from Copernicus crater, 230 miles to the north, material that scientists had hoped to find. Post-mission analysis of samples from Head crater allowed geologists to date the Copernicus impact event. Conrad and Bean had secretly brought an automatic timer for their Hasselblad cameras, planning to take a selfie with Surveyor 3, but could not locate it among the samples already packed into their Hand Tool Carrier. They returned from the two EVAs with 73.75 pounds of lunar samples.

• 7. Aftermath and Orbit

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  The Apollo 12 command module Yankee Clipper was displayed at the Paris Air Show after the mission and then placed at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Ownership transferred to the Smithsonian in July 1971. It is now on display at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton. The careers of the three crew members diverged sharply. Conrad persuaded both crewmates to join the Skylab program. He commanded Skylab 2, the first crewed mission to the space station. Bean commanded Skylab 3. Gordon chose differently; he still hoped to walk on the Moon and remained with Apollo, serving as backup commander of Apollo 15. He was likely to have commanded Apollo 18, but that mission was canceled, and he never flew in space again. Orbiting alone during the lunar surface operations, Gordon had performed the Lunar Multispectral Photography Experiment, using four Hasselblad cameras fitted with different color filters and arranged in a ring, aimed through a CM window. The simultaneous images captured lunar features at different points on the spectrum, potentially revealing compositional data invisible to the naked eye. Among the sites he photographed were candidate landing zones for future Apollo missions, including some that would never be visited because the program ended before they could be reached.