Here’s where it gets weirdly funny. The Apollo 12 mission almost ended before it began. Their rocket was struck by lightning twice during launch—once at 36 seconds, and again at 52 seconds. The command module’s fuel cells shut down, alarms blared, and NASA nearly called an abort. But Alan Bean, sitting in the center seat, had a secret weapon: he’d memorized the backup procedure for restarting the fuel cells because he was bored during training.
While the astronauts up front (Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon) were shouting about the alarms, Bean calmly flipped the right switches and rebooted the system. He later joked, “I saved the mission by being a nerd who didn’t have anything better to do.” And that, my friend, is how the fourth moonwalker avoided becoming a pile of space debris. Always be the nerd, kids.
Moonwalking with Style
Once on the surface, Bean and Commander Pete Conrad did something revolutionary: they laughed. While Armstrong and Aldrin were practicing solemnity, Conrad hopped off the ladder and cracked, “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!” Bean followed suit, tripping over his own feet and shouting, “I’m falling! I’m falling!”—then realizing lunar gravity is so gentle, he just kind of floated down.
They also pulled a prank that still makes historians chuckle. Before the flight, a friend slipped a hamburger into Bean’s spacesuit pocket. Out on the Moon, he pulled it out and took a bite. The photo of him munching a squished burger on a desolate lunar plain is one of the most absurd images in space history. “Tastes like chicken,” he said. “But cold chicken.”
Apollo Painting
