For All Mankind by Harry Hurt

Author:Harry Hurt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

10

SNOOPY AND THE SURVEYOR

Man’s Second Moon Landing

Apollo 12: November 18–20, 1969

Nobody ever remembers what the second person to do something does.

APOLLO 12 COMMANDER CHARLES “PETE” CONRAD, JR.

On July 21, 1969, the New York Times announced Apollo 11’s triumphant success with the biggest headline in the paper’s entire history of publication. The one-inch-high block letters bannered across the front page summarized the most extraordinary technological feat of the twentieth century in four short, simple, but unforgettable words:

“MEN WALK ON MOON.”

Man’s first lunar landing was one of the few epochal events in human history that personally affected the witnesses as much as if not more than the actual participants. Regardless of whether they reacted with speechless wonder or passionate outrage, the estimated one billion people in the worldwide TV and radio audience would always remember exactly where they were and how they felt when Neil Armstrong made his “giant leap for mankind.”

But as Apollo 12’s Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., wryly observed in a later interview: “Nobody ever remembers what the second person to do something does.”

Conrad speaks from unique personal experience. In November of 1969, less than four months after Apollo 11’s heroic return to Earth, he commanded man’s second lunar landing mission.

The Apollo 12 astronauts had, by definition, the most anti-climactic assignment in the annals of modern space exploration. Barring the unlikely prospect of encountering intelligent life on or en route to the moon, nothing they hoped to accomplish could possibly equal—much less upstage—the immortal deeds of their predecessors.

But contrary to a widespread public misconception, Apollo 12 was not merely a replay of Apollo 11. Neither were the five subsequent lunar landing missions, especially not unlucky Apollo 13. Each trio of astronauts targeted a different region of the lunar surface with different scientific objectives in mind and with different operational demands to meet. And although the uninformed public grew blasé about space travel, each crew faced incrementally greater dangers, for the statistical probability of catastrophe increased in the wake of every success.

Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad and lunar module pilot Al Bean were bound for the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum), a rolling crater field 995 miles due west of the Sea of Tranquility on the far “left” of the moon’s front side. One of their primary objectives was to retrieve a piece of the Surveyor 3, an unmanned photoreconnaissance probe that soft-landed in the area in April of 1967. But in order to do so, they would have to make man’s first pinpoint lunar landing, a far trickier and more hazardous maneuver than Apollo 11’s hit-or-miss landing procedure.

Last-minute computer program overloads and guidance system malfunctions had caused Armstrong and Aldrin to overshoot their targeted landing site by some four miles, nearly dashing them against a boulder field. Conrad and Bean had to touch down within walking distance of the Surveyor, which meant they could not err by more than a quarter of a mile. And simply locating the probe, even with the help of voluminous photoreconnaissance maps and the computers at Mission Control, was like finding a needle in a haystack 240,000 miles away.

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