Because I'm the third PolarTREC teacher to travel to the South Pole with the IceCube project, I thought it would be fun to highlight other third people. So, once a month (on the 3rd, naturally), I'll post a "third person" journal. The journals will look at people who have made contributions in their fields but might be relatively unknown since they weren't the first.
Third Person on the Moon
In July of 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon. Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin quickly followed. Four months later, on November 19th, Pete Conrad took his first steps on the moon, earning his place in history as the third person to walk on the moon.
Pete Conrad, photo courtesy NASA
Pete's Background
Charles "Pete" Conrad was born in 1930. Unfortunately, this was a bad time to be born as the Great Depression had just begun. Pete's family lost a lot of money and suffered some bad effects from this - they had to move into a much smaller house and, eventually, Pete's dad (a banker) left the family.
Pete also had the misfortune to suffer from dyslexia. His teachers thought he just wasn't very smart (because dyslexia was not very well understood at that time) but his mom knew that wasn't the case and so she moved him to a different school. Pete did really well there that, even though he had to repeat the 11th grade, he was still admitted to Princeton University with a full scholarship from the Naval ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) program. He used the scholarship to get a degree in Aeronautical Engineering.
As part of the ROTC scholarship, Pete was required to go into the Navy after he graduated from college. Luckily, while he'd been in high school, he'd also earned his pilot's license so when he did enter the Navy, he was well qualified to become a pilot. He eventually became a flight instructor and then a test pilot.
NASA
Around that time, a relatively new agency had been formed by the government. This new program was called the National Air and Space Administration (NASA). NASA was recruiting its first group of astronauts - the Mercury Seven - and they wanted Pete to apply. So he did.
But he didn't get selected.
Due to several incidents during the selection process, NASA determined that Pete was "not suitable for long-duration flight." Later on, when NASA was looking for its second group of astronauts - the New Nine - Pete again applied and got accepted.
The New Nine - Back to front, left to right: See, McDivitt, Lovell, White, STafford, Conrad, Borman, Armstrong, and Young. Photo courtesy of NASA
Pete's Missions
Pete trained for several missions before he landed on the moon. His first was Gemini 5, which he nicknamed "the flying garbage can." After that, he commanded Gemini 11 and then Apollo 12. (He also trained to be part of the backup crew for Gemini 8 and Apollo 9.)
The mission patches for Gemini 5, Gemini 11, Apollo 12, and Skylab 2. Photo courtesy of NASA.
Gemini 5 was 8 days long and was basically used to prove that a spacecraft (and the astronauts) could last long enough to go to the moon and back.
Gemini 11 demonstrated a couple different things - that two spacecraft could be docked (the Gemini capsule was docked with an Agena rocket) and that artificial gravity could be created by spinning the two crafts around. The docking aspect was really important because it was similar to the maneuvers that would be required of the astronauts who would land on the moon. In other words, NASA realized if the Gemini could dock with another spacecraft, then so could the Apollo command module.
(One of the funny things about Gemini 11 is that Neil Armstrong was Pete Conrad's back up so, if something happened that prevented Pete's crew from going, Neil's would've gone instead.)
Walking on the Moon
After a harrowing space flight during which their craft was struck twice by lightning, Apollo 12 made it to the moon only four months after Apollo 11. Pete Conrad was the commander and would be the first one out of the capsule, followed by the Lunar Module pilot, Alan Bean.
On November 19, 1969, Pete Conrad stepped onto the moon and uttered his momentous first words...
"Ooh, that is soft and queasy."
Pete Conrad descending the Apollo 12 ladder, moments before stepping on the moon. Photo by Alan Bean, courtesy of NASA.
While Conrad and Bean were on the moon, they performed several tasks but they also had a secret mission - one formulated by Bean. They were going to use a self-timer on the camera NASA had provided to take a picture of both of the astronauts at the same time. (On Apollo 11, all of the pictures only had one astronaut because the other one had to hold the camera to take the picture. That was the plan for Apollo 12 too, but Bean thought it'd be neat to have both him and Conrad in one picture.) Unfortunately, they couldn't find the timer until it was too late, so they never got to take the picture. Bean, who was also an artist, did make a painting of what he thought it would've looked like ("The Fabulous Photo We Never Took").
Apollo 12 returned to Earth on November 24th.
The Last Mission
Pete Conrad's last tour in space was as the commander of Skylab 2 in 1973. After that, he retired and worked at an aerospace company.
In 1999, almost 30 full years after he walked on the moon, Pete Conrad was in a fatal motorcycle crash. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and was posthumously given the Ambassador of Exploration Award by NASA.
The Ambassador of Exploration award. It includes a piece of lunar material collected during the Apollo missions. Photo courtesy of NASA.