... 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.
“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.