Word: conrade
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
Surveyor Crater. "Conrad's Parking Lot"-the landing site chosen by Conrad -was on the opposite side of the crater, just 800 ft. away. The pinpoint landing on a target 230,000 miles away from the launch pad at Cape Kennedy boded well for the remainder of Apollo 12's mission. Even more important, it proved that U.S. space scientists had profited from the lessons of Apollo 11 -which overshot its target by four miles -and could now confidently plan for manned exploration of the more rugged highland regions of the moon...
...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...
...Conrad and Bean had already exceeded the 2 hr. 21 min. lunar walk taken by Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. But they hardly noticed the passage of time. With the enthusiasm of Tenderfoot Boy Scouts, they photographed and collected rocks, took a sample core of the lunar soil, poked into innumerable small craters and fascinated geologists with their descriptions of small, strange-looking mounds. "Don't take this the wrong way," Bean cautioned, "but they look like small volcanoes-only they're just about 4 ft. high." After four hours of exploring, during which they strayed about...