The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

At 8:25 am on 20 November the ascent stage of the Lunar Module blasted off for the second copybook launch from the Moon’s surface. As they were shooting up to enter orbit Conrad offered his friend Bean the controls of the Lunar Module.

Bean recalls, “Pete said to me, ‘You’re working too hard, go ahead and look out the window,’ so I looked out the window, and then he said ‘Would you like to fly the LM?’ and I said, ‘Well, yeah I’d love to.’

“I grabbed the controls [Bean had a set the same as Conrad] but before I moved them I said, ‘We don’t want to get off course.’ We had a program that measured velocity in every direction, so Pete said, ‘Let’s call up that program?’ Well, of course it read zero because that’s where it starts. Then I knew if I flew two feet per second left that it would measure it, then after I had finished flying around for a few minutes then I could thrust all those readings back to zero, and we would be right back on course again. I started to fly the LM then I said, ‘The people in Mission Control aren’t going to like this’ – they would notice the thrusters were firing, and they would be wondering why they were firing, and they could also tell it was my hand controller. They might think there was a failure. Pete said, ‘Well, we’re over on the backside of the Moon, they won’t know a thing about it.’ Of course they would know, because everything is recorded on the tape recorder. I’m sure they discovered it later, but it didn’t make any difference. After talking to other people, as far as I know I was the only LM pilot that got to fly the LM. That just shows how special Pete was.”

Bean will always be grateful to Conrad for his thoughtfulness.

Intrepid went on to meet Yankee Clipper with a now very happy Gordon waiting to welcome his mates. When Gordon opened the hatch and saw the two dirty-looking moonwalkers covered in clouds of lunar dust about to invade his spacecraft, he slammed the hatch with, “You guys ain’t gonna mess up my nice clean spacecraft?” Conrad and Bean had to undress and clean up before being allowed to enter the Yankee Clipper, naked.

After being jettisoned, this was the first time the Lunar Module was driven into the lunar surface to exercise the ALSEP seismometers. Smashing itself to smithereens at 6,012 kilometres per hour, about 72 kilometres from the Apollo 12 ALSEP seismometer, the geophysicists stared at their readouts in growing astonishment as the shock waves built up to a peak at 8 minutes, and died away over a period of 55 minutes. On Earth the same impact would have lasted about two minutes. Dr Maurice Ewing of Columbia University’s Lamont Observatory exclaimed, “It was as though one had struck a bell in a church belfry a single blow and its reveberation had continued for 55 minutes.” This strange phenomenon was repeated with every heavy impact in subsequent missions on all the seismometers.

On the return journey the Apollo 12 astronauts were witness to the first eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. The three astronauts watched a thin sliver of Sun behind the dark mass of the moonlit Earth, and took the first photographs of the Earth’s atmosphere backed by the Sun. The dark side of the Earth was laced with lightning flashes along the equator and the specular light of the full Moon behind them gleamed off the black oceans. Alan Bean decided it was the most spectacular view of the whole flight.

At 2:58 pm Houston time Apollo 12 landed in a rough Pacific Ocean on 24 November, 7.2 kilometres from the carrier USS Hornet. Bean was standing by to quickly punch two circuit breakers to cast off the parachutes before they were pulled over upside down. The Command Module hit the sea with such a jolt Bean felt momentarily dizzy, although he heard Gordon call out, “Hey Al, hit the breakers,” as they began to turn over.

Gordon queried, “Al, what happened?”

“Nothing happened, what are you talking about?”

“You’re bleeding?” Conrad was looking at a gash above Bean’s eye where the 16mm movie camera had broken loose and struck Bean.

A surprised Bean told his companions, “It must have knocked me out for a few seconds, and I didn’t even know it?”

After a welcome on the Hornet, Bean required two stitches in the sick bay before the astronauts were taken to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory for their eleven days, and the second mission to the Moon’s surface was safely over. Apollo 12 had proved the navigation systems were accurate enough to land on the chosen spot, the hardware systems, including the ALSEP, were good enough to support the requirements of the mission, and the astronauts were able to do useful work in a lunar environment.

Apollo 13’s problem – 11–17 April 1970

Apollo 13’s mission was to make the third landing on the moon.