Posted on 05/29/2018 10:06:57 AM PDT by Rummyfan
The fourth person to walk on the Moon, astronaut Alan Bean, died over the weekend. This is the wild true story of Apollo 12, and how a little creativity and ingenuity saved the day.
Astronaut and artist Alan Bean died over the weekend at age 86. He was the fourth human to walk on the moon as part of the crew of Apollo 12, and spent 31 hours on the lunar surface. Before he got there, the astronaut had to survive his first, hectic launch into space and help the crew find the right way to the moon in a forgotten episode he later remarked “was one of my finer hours." Here is that story.
It is November 14, 1969, and Alan Bean is about to be launched into space for the first time in his career.
He’s seated inside the Command and Service Module of Apollo 12, the Yankee Clipper. Beneath him, five huge engines are roaring and producing 7.6 million pounds of thrust. “Boy, there's no doubt in your mind when that thing lifts off,” Bean will later comment to his crewmates. “That bitch hauls out.”
The other crewmen, Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon Jr., are veterans of earlier missions, but after just 36 seconds of flight, they encounter something they’ve never expected. “What the hell was that?” Conrad says. A few seconds later Gordon adds, “I lost a whole bunch of stuff; I don't know…” Banks of warning lights flicker on as the Yankee Clipper, built to protect its components from power surges, shuts down its instrumentation.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Fascinating guy.
It’s almost incomprehensible how much of the right stuff the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo men possessed.
p
the Right Stuff ping..
Tried reading the article but, the construct of prose got to be a bit much...
These were still adventurers’ and explorers who came from the era of the greatest generation. Thousands of engineers, scientists, and of course the flight crews involved in the incredible undertaking of putting men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth. Physical evidence returned (moon rocks) and photographic evidence of events, Newton’s law of gravity demonstrated in lunar vacuum for all the world to see, laser reflectors left that still are used today for lunar orbit prediction....and yet, just wait for the conspiracy deniers to come a post’in, just because it was, in fact, a government venture.
RIP Captain
Please add me
... The crew doesn’t yet know it, but the rocket has been struck by lightning twice during liftoff, once 36 seconds after liftoff and again 17 seconds later. The rocket is a mile and a half high, moving faster than 15,000 feet per second, when Conrad says, “Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here; we had everything in the world drop out.” The data stream from the service module had simply ceased. Bean thinks maybe the entire section of the spacecraft has fallen away.
“This was no failure that we’d ever practiced,” Bean tells NASA historians. “I said [to myself] ‘We’re getting ready to go into orbit without a service module.’ ” ....
After all that, Alan Bean’s first space launch has gone terribly wrong after less than a minute. He’s staring at the warning lights, but he can see the batteries are still putting out the requisite power. He keeps saying this to his crew and mission control as the team scrambles to determine what happened and what to do.
The ground suggests resetting the seemingly ailing systems, but Bean hesitates. “One of the rules of space flight is you don’t make any switch-a-roos with that electrical system unless you’ve got a good idea why you’re doing it,” he will later say. “I knew we had power, so I didn’t want to make any changes. I figured we could fly into orbit just like that.” (Gordon, in a 1969 technical debrief, agrees with Bean’s choice to wait and think it through: “I think it was a smart decision. We’ve all learned that by arbitrarily switching the electrical system around, you can get yourself into more trouble.”) ....
After some deliberation, and as it becomes more clear that lightning was the culprit, Bean begins to reset the electrical systems. He is credited with remembering the existence of a backup power switch to the signal conditioning electronics that, when used, helps cut the time of the recovery from the incident and keeps the mission from being aborted.
Interesting article, thanks for posting it!
Good post.
Thank you. I enjoyed it.
Popular Mechanics instantly crashes my browser.
It won’t be long before there aren’t any left who actually have been to the moon.
It was John Aaron at Ground Control who made the call 'Try SCE to Auxiliary' and became an engineering legend.
Barring a miracle or three, it's entirely possible that it won't be long before there aren't any of us left who actually remember 'America'.
Well, it has been some 45 years or more...and to some, if they didn’t see it happen yesterday, it never happened.
Words to live by.
Had this been a snowflake crew we’d have heard screams of terror and sheer panic as the spacecraft fell back to earth.
“He is credited with remembering the existence of a backup power switch to the signal conditioning electronics that, when used, helps cut the time of the recovery from the incident and keeps the mission from being aborted.”
No, he is not. That honor belongs to Flight Controller John Aaron, who had witnessed a similar hork about a year prior, in training. He recalled what needed to be done, the now famous but cryptic advice “SCE to AUX”, and which nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. Bean DID know where the circuit breaker or switch was, behind his head, but he had recounted many times he had absolutely no idea what to do. “Christmas Tree” doesn’t adequately describe what the displays looked like. Once everything straightened out, our intrepid explorers giggled like schoolchildren the rest of the way into orbit. I suspect John Aaron hasn’t had to pay for a beer in a long, long time.
Interesting story. Thanks for posting.
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