Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

What would happen to an astronaut if he fell down on the Moon in his suit? This was one of the concerns of the mission planners, but Conrad and Bean found it was actually fun. Conrad was the first astronaut to be able to answer that question in the first astronaut news conference from space: “I was trying to pick up something and I was just standing there next to Al. It was a rock that was just too big to go into the tongs. We had a sort of game we played there of leaning on tongs and sort of doing a one arm jabber-doo [a Conrad one-arm push up] all stretched out… I just sort of rolled over on my side down there on the ground and Al, before I got all the way down, just gave me a shove back up again. I don’t think it will be any problem, the business of falling against a rock and cutting your space suit. You don’t fall that fast. You wouldn’t hit a rock hard enough.”

Bean backed him up: “When you start, you fall so slowly that it gives you plenty of time almost to turn around or catch your footing before you get low enough down before it’s too late. I can recall a number of times when I lost my balance. If I had lost my balance that much on Earth, I would probably have fallen down. Now on the Moon, since you start moving so slowly, you’re usually able to spin around, bend your knees and recover.”

One of the big disappointments of the mission was the television camera breaking down after only 20 minutes. As Bean placed it in another spot, Nevil Eyre, video technician at Honeysuckle Creek, was watching his screen. “I could see that Alan Bean was starting to point the TV camera at the Sun, because it was getting very bright up in the top left corner of the screen – then I could see it starting to peel away from the left… it was like somebody holding a sheet of paper and putting a match to it – no flames, just burning, rolling back in a boomerang shape – and I wanted to scream at them to point the camera away from the Sun. Even the Capcom in Houston didn’t know what was happening, the message wasn’t getting to Bean. I heard the Capcom say, ‘We’re not seeing any picture, see if you can bump it’, and Bean tapped it with his hammer. I knew that wasn’t going to fix it – I knew exactly what had happened. That was the end of any video pictures from the Moon this mission.”

Lindsay remembered:

“The rest of the lunar activities were followed from the Earth only with sound. To us at the tracking station it was quite strange to only have black screens around, and the normally busy video section helping the telemetry technicians. Luckily the personalities of Conrad, with his infectious chuckles, ‘Dum-de-dum dum’s,’ and Bean with his enthusiastic descriptions, entertained us as they whooped, hummed, joked, and rollicked around, already quite at home in this alien new environment.”

Following a thirteen-hour rest period after the first day’s activities, the two astronauts emerged from the tiny hatch again and noticed that the scene looked less dramatic. Apollo 12 had the lowest Sun angle of 5° of the Apollo missions and while they were resting the shadows had shortened and the colours had shifted from a gray to a warmer tan-gray. It now looked much easier to get to the Surveyor spacecraft.

They headed off on foot, skirting around Head Crater and Bench Crater, before turning back at Sharp Crater. They picked up samples until they arrived at the Surveyor, and were surprised to find it a brown colour when they thought it had been white at launch. As they puzzled over where this brown had come from, the soil around being gray, Houston threw in: “Hey, Pete, do you think there is a chance you are at the wrong Surveyor?”

Replied Conrad, “No, sir. Boy, it sure dug in the ground, didn’t it? Oh, look at those pad marks. They’re still there.”

Later Conrad wrote: “The Surveyor was coated with a coating of fine dust, and it looked tan, or even brown, in the lunar light, instead of the glistening white that it was when it left Earth. It was decided later that the dust was kicked up by our descent onto the surface, even though we were 183 metres away.

“We cut samples of the aluminium tubing, which seemed more brittle than the same material on Earth, and some electrical cables. Their insulation seemed to have gotten dry, hard, and brittle. We managed to break off a piece of glass, and we unbolted the TV camera. Then Al suggested we cut off and take back the sampling scoop, and so we added that to the collection.”

Back at the Lunar Module, while waiting for Bean to hoist the samples up, Conrad said, “I feel just like a guy at a shopping centre with the groceries, waiting for his wife.”

After stowing their rock collections they attempted to clean up the clinging lunar dust. “Man, are we filthy. We need a whisk broom,” complained Conrad, frustrated with the impossible task of cleaning up the mess.

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.