Apollo 12 Walks the Moon: Third and Fourth Humans Land

Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed the Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid on the Ocean of Storms, touching down just 183 meters from the Surveyor 3 probe that had been sitting on the Moon since 1967. The pinpoint landing demonstrated that NASA could put astronauts exactly where it wanted them on the lunar surface, transforming the Moon from a destination to a workplace. Conrad, stepping onto the surface, delivered a line he had bet a reporter he would say: "Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me." Apollo 12 launched on November 14, 1969, into a rain-drenched sky, and almost ended 36 seconds later. The Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning twice during ascent, knocking the command module's electrical system offline. Telemetry at Mission Control went haywire. Flight controller John Aaron recognized the garbled data from a simulation and called out a near-forgotten switch setting: "SCE to Aux." Lunar module pilot Bean, who happened to know the location of this obscure switch, flipped it, and the instruments came back to life. The mission continued. The landing was the first precision touchdown on the Moon. Apollo 11 had landed four miles from its target; Apollo 12 was within walking distance of Surveyor 3. Conrad and Bean conducted two EVAs totaling nearly eight hours, deploying the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, a suite of scientific instruments powered by a nuclear generator that would transmit data back to Earth for years. During the second EVA, Conrad and Bean walked to Surveyor 3 and removed its camera and several other components to bring back for analysis. Scientists wanted to study how three years of exposure to the lunar environment had affected the hardware. The returned camera later became the subject of a famous claim that bacteria sealed inside it had survived on the Moon, though subsequent analysis suggested the organisms were laboratory contaminants introduced during examination on Earth.