Word: beaning
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...They missed a diverting incident. The Apollo 12, with a price tag of roughly $375 million, represents a refinement of hundreds of years of scientific experiment and theory, the most intricate hardware of a technological civilization. Yet when the television camera fritzed out on the lunar surface, Astronaut Alan Bean had a moment of atavism. Like any other 20th century man confronted by the perversity of nonfunctioning machines, he whacked it with his hammer...
...pick a destination on the moon's rugged surface and reach it as reliably as a taxicab finds a street address in Manhattan. Directly ahead of Intrepid lay the five craters that form the familiar pattern of "Snowman." Guided unerringly by the spacecraft computer. Astronauts Conrad and Alan Bean headed straight toward the target picked months earlier in Houston: Surveyor Crater, which forms Snowman's torso and is the spot where 21 years ago the unmanned Surveyor 3 landed on the moon. Conrad could scarcely believe his eyes. "Son of a gun!" he said. "Right down the middle...
Crater's Edge. Only 500 ft. above the surface, Navy Pilot Conrad took control of the LM for the final few seconds of the descent, while Bean read data from the instrument panel: "Forty-two ft., coming down at three [ft. per sec.]. Forty coming down at two. Looking good. Thirty-one, 30 ft., you've got plenty of gas, plenty of gas, Pete. Stay in there. Eighteen ft., coming down. He's got it made. Come on in there. Contact lights!" Although thick dust kicked up by the LM's rocket engine obscured his view...
...dust settled down, Conrad could not contain his exuberance. "Holy cow, it's beautiful out here!" he shouted. Looking out over the Ocean of Storms, both he and Bean-unlike the relatively taciturn Apollo 11 crew-gushed. They described an undulating plain pocked by craters and filled with large boulders that looked gleaming white in the early-morning sun. "Damn, I can't wait to get outside," said Conrad. "Those rocks have been waiting 41 billion years for us to come and grab them...
What turned out to be one of Apollo 12's most valuable tools-the hammer-again came in handy before the deployment of ALSEP. While Bean offered encouragement ("Pound harder. Keep going, baby"), Conrad tapped on the plutonium core, which had become stuck in its protective cask. Finally loosened, the core was removed and inserted into the generator. Without the core, the generator would have been unable to provide electricity to power ALSEP's experiments and its radio gear...