Pete Conrad

• 1. Introduction

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  Pete Conrad stepped off the Lunar Module's ladder on the 19th of November 1969, paused on the landing pad, and jumped down onto the Moon. His first words were not the solemn kind. "Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me." That quip had been years in the making. Conrad had privately bet the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci $500 that NASA did not script its astronauts' remarks. The joke was the proof.

  Conrad was the third person to walk on the Moon, yet he remains one of the least heralded figures of the Apollo era. He was expelled from high school, rejected from NASA's first astronaut class with a note calling him unsuitable for long-duration flight, and stood only 5 feet tall. He went on to command four missions across three different programs, set an endurance record in space, and personally saved a crippled space station with his bare hands.

  How a dyslexic kid from Philadelphia who once delivered a stool sample in a gift box ended up earning the Congressional Space Medal of Honor is a story about stubbornness, humor, and a particular kind of talent that no test at the Lovelace Clinic could measure.

• 2. A Difficult Start

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  Charles Conrad Jr. was born on the 2nd of June 1930 in Philadelphia, the first son of a well-to-do real estate and banking family. The Great Depression ended that comfort quickly. By 1942 the family had lost their manor home and moved into a small carriage house paid for by Frances's brother, Egerton Vinson. Conrad's father, broken by financial failure, eventually left the family entirely.

  School became its own kind of struggle. Conrad had dyslexia, a condition little understood at the time, and he failed most of his 11th-grade exams at the Haverford School. Haverford expelled him. His mother refused to accept that her son was unintelligent and found him a place at Darrow School in New Lebanon, New York. There Conrad learned to apply a systems approach to learning that let him work around his dyslexia. He repeated the 11th grade, then excelled. By graduation in 1949 he had captained the football team, despite standing only 5 feet 6 inches and weighing 135 pounds, and earned both admission to Princeton and a full Navy ROTC scholarship.

  Conrad had been preparing for something aviation-shaped since he was 15. He worked summers at the Paoli Airfield near Paoli, Pennsylvania, bartering lawn mowing and odd jobs for flights. At 16 he drove nearly 100 miles alone to repair a flight instructor's grounded aircraft, fixing it single-handedly and earning flight lessons in return. He earned his pilot's certificate before graduating from high school. By the time he left Princeton in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering, he had also added an instrument flight rating to his credentials.

• 3. The Gift Box Rebellion

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  In 1959 NASA was assembling the Mercury Seven, and Conrad was among the candidates called to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico for evaluation. The testing was, by the candidates' own account, invasive and demeaning. Conrad took a different view of it than most of his peers. During a Rorschach inkblot test, he told the psychiatrist that one card depicted a lurid sexual encounter in considerable detail. When presented with a blank card, he turned it around, pushed it back, and announced that it was upside down.

  The stool sample request produced a more theatrical response. Conrad placed the sample in a gift box, tied it with a red ribbon, and delivered it to the lab. He eventually dropped his full enema bag on the desk of the clinic's commanding officer and walked out. NASA denied his application, noting in its records that he was not suitable for long-duration flight.

  Mercury veteran Alan Shepard, who knew Conrad from their shared time as naval aviators and test pilots, stepped in when NASA opened its second astronaut search. Shepard approached Conrad and persuaded him to reapply. The second round of tests struck Conrad as less invasive. In June 1962 he was selected, joining what would be called the New Nine. The notation about long-duration unsuitability had apparently expired. The Gemini 5 mission would soon make it look absurd.

• 4. Records and Docking

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  Conrad joined NASA on the 17th of September 1962 and was regarded by his peers as one of the group's finest pilots. His first flight came on Gemini 5 in 1965, paired with commander Gordon Cooper. Together they set a new space endurance record: 7 days, 22 hours, and 55 minutes in orbit, surpassing the Soviet record of five days and matching the duration that a crewed lunar landing mission would require. Conrad called the Gemini 5 capsule a flying garbage can.

  Conrad also stood 5 feet tall, a fact that mattered inside the cramped Gemini spacecraft. He found the confinement noticeably less punishing than his taller crewmates did. That compact frame was not a liability in orbit.

  Gemini 11, which he commanded in 1966 alongside pilot Richard Gordon, reached a record-setting apogee of 1,369 kilometers, the highest crewed Earth orbit ever achieved. The mission also docked with an Agena target vehicle immediately after reaching orbit, a maneuver that closely mimicked what the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module would need to do years later. Conrad was methodically accumulating the exact skills the Moon program would demand.

  An organizational shuffle in 1968 redirected what might have been his path to Apollo 11. Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton's standard rotation would have put Conrad in line to command that mission. A swap of Apollo 8 and Apollo 9 changed the sequence, and Conrad was assigned to Apollo 12 instead.

• 5. Skylab and the Stuck Panel

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  Apollo 12 launched on the 14th of November 1969. Lightning struck the vehicle twice just after liftoff, temporarily knocking out power and guidance in the Command Module. The crew, Conrad among them, held on.

  Conrad's final mission proved to be the most technically consequential of his career. Skylab had been damaged during its uncrewed launch: the micrometeoroid shield had torn away, taking one of its two main solar panels with it and jamming the remaining one so it could not deploy. When Conrad and his crew arrived on Skylab 2 in 1973, the station was critically compromised.

  They worked across two spacewalks. The crew erected a parasol solar shield to substitute for the lost micrometeoroid shield, protecting the station from heating that would otherwise have rendered it and everything inside it unusable. Conrad freed the stuck solar panel by sheer brute force, pulling it loose himself. He later described this as one of his proudest moments. President Jimmy Carter acknowledged the feat in 1978 by awarding Conrad the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

  During training for Skylab 2, Conrad had been forced to eject from a NASA T-38 on the 10th of May 1972 after a generator failure at 800 feet on approach to Ellington AFB. He ran out of fuel as he reached Bergstrom AFB and ejected at 3,700 feet. He landed about 100 yards from the base operations building. His aircraft crashed in an open field about two miles away.

• 6. Life After NASA

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  Conrad left NASA and the Navy in 1973 and went to work for American Television and Communications Company, where he oversaw the operation of existing cable systems and the national development of new ones.

  In 1976, he accepted a position at McDonnell Douglas. When a DC-10 engine fell off and the aircraft crashed with the loss of all passengers and crew in 1979, Conrad led McDonnell Douglas's effort to reassure the public and protect the plane's reputation. The effort did not succeed.

  On the 14th of February 1996, Conrad was part of the crew on a record-breaking around-the-world flight in a Learjet owned by cable television pioneer Bill Daniels. The flight lasted 49 hours, 26 minutes, and 8 seconds. The aircraft is now on permanent static display at Denver International Airport's Terminal C.

  A month before his death, Conrad appeared on ABC News Nightline and argued that the Space Shuttle was worth a billion dollars per launch, even worth two billion for the work it performed. In his final interview, for PBS's Nova, he called a return to the Moon a waste of taxpayer money and recommended missions to Mars and asteroids instead. He died on the 8th of July 1999 from internal injuries sustained when his motorcycle crashed on a turn while he was traveling with his wife and friends from Huntington Beach toward Monterey, California. He was wearing a helmet and operating within the speed limit. He was 69.

• 7. The Tree With Red Lights

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  Conrad was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Among those attending were many Apollo-era astronauts. Willie Nelson performed "Amazing Grace."

  At the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA maintains a grove of trees planted to honor astronauts who have died. After Conrad's death, a tree was planted for him. At the dedication ceremony, his Apollo 12 crewmate Alan Bean used his speech to inject levity into the occasion. Bean described channeling instructions from Conrad about how the tree should be decorated each Christmas: colored lights, not the white lights used for every other tree, in keeping with Conrad's personal motto, "when you can't be good, be colourful."

  NASA honored the request. Every Christmas since, all the trees in the grove have been lit with white lights. Conrad's tree alone is lit with red.