Fwd: Remembering Apollo 12

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: November 10, 2013 3:01:23 PM CST
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Remembering Apollo 12

I am sure this launch brought back a lot of memories for some of us old Apollo engineers. I was in the MER for launch and very involved in the post mission report since it involved in tripping off some many electrical functions all AC power and all fuel cell power. Feel free to share your experience and I will pass the information on to the others.

Take care,

Gary  

 

 

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores

November 9th, 2013

 

Remembering Apollo 12: The $500 Bet and the Lightning Strike (Part 1)

By Ben Evans

 

Al Bean begins his descent from the hatch of the lunar module Intrepid toward the surface at the Ocean of Storms. Photo Credit: NASA

One thing that irritated Charles "Pete" Conrad was the public belief that astronauts were told to say certain things during their missions. He knew that when Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the Moon in July 1969, the immortal words he spoke—"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"—had been his own. However, there remained many naysayers who doubted that a test pilot could have dreamed such appropriately poetic words. One afternoon, Conrad and his first wife, Jane, entertained a fearsome Italian journalist named Oriana Fallaci at their Houston home. Fallaci was convinced that NASA brass had told Armstrong to say what he did … and Fallaci was not the kind of personality to be argued with. Until she met Pete Conrad, that is.

In her later career, Fallaci would lambast Ayatollah Khomeini about the "medieval" regime he had imposed on Iran, and even Henry Kissinger would endure the most "disastrous" interview of his career at her hands. Sitting with Conrad in the summer of 1969, Fallaci's criticism turned to NASA. There was no way, she scoffed, that Armstrong could possibly have dreamed up his historic words on the spot. For his part, Conrad could not prove that Armstrong had dreamed them up, but he knew that no one had forced the words onto him. "Pity the twit who would try to script a bunch of test pilots and fighter jocks, egos fully intact, riding a rocket to the Moon," reflected Conrad's second wife, Nancy, in her 2005 book Rocketman.

For Pete Conrad, there was a simple solution. He was assigned to command Apollo 12 and, if the schedule held, he would be the third man to walk on the lunar surface. He told Fallaci that he would make up his first words—right there and then—and agreed a bet of $500. Fallaci, convinced that he would not get away with it, agreed. A few months later, on the desolate plain of Oceanus Procellarum, the Moon's Ocean of Storms, Conrad hopped down the ladder of the lunar module Intrepid … and said it. Unfortunately for him, Fallaci never paid up.

Pete Conrad (right) and Al Bean are pictured aboard the lunar module simulator in October 1969, during Apollo 12 pre-flight training. Photo Credit: NASA

In early 1969, many within NASA were convinced that Apollo 12, not Apollo 11, was most likely to accomplish humanity's most exalted goal of the 20th century. It seemed inconceivable that the Apollo command, service, and lunar modules, and the Saturn V booster, together with such complexities as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous and the descent and landing profile to the Moon, could possibly be accomplished in just a few months. With Pete Conrad named as commander of Apollo 12, many eyes were on him to become the first man on the Moon. In February, NASA published a long-range planning forecast, which listed Apollo 9 as an Earth-orbit dress rehearsal in March, Apollo 10 as a lunar-orbit dress rehearsal in May, and then no fewer than three opportunities to perform a landing: Apollo 11 in July, Apollo 12 in September, and Apollo 13 in November.

So it was that by June 1969, Apollo 12 had two different personalities. If Apollo 11 did not succeed, Conrad and his crewmates—command module pilot Dick Gordon and lunar module pilot Al Bean—would inherit the mission, but if Armstrong's flight succeeded, Apollo 12 would expand in scope to attempt the first precision landing on the Moon, not far from an old NASA spacecraft called Surveyor 3. During two moonwalks, Conrad and Bean would visit the craft, retrieve a couple of its instruments, and bring them back to Earth. By the end of July, the race to the Moon had been won and Apollo 12′s daring plan to land in the Ocean Storms, about 800 miles (1,300 km) west of the Sea of Tranquility, came into effect.

The need to make pinpoint landings was understandable, for there seemed little point in training crews to achieve specific geological objectives if they had no guarantees where their lunar modules would set down. Through no fault of their own, Armstrong and Aldrin had landed 4 miles (6 km) downrange of the intended position. The trajectory specialists had several explanations, including the "lumpiness" of the Moon's gravitational field, but mathematician Emil Schiesser made the final breakthrough. The key was the Doppler effect: an apparent "shifting" in frequency of light or sound waves emitted by a moving object when viewed by a stationary observer.

The Surveyor 3 landing craft, backdropped by the Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid, as viewed by Pete Conrad and Al Bean at the Ocean of Storms in November 1969. Photo Credit: NASA

Radio signals from lunar modules had a predictable pattern of Doppler effect, explained Andrew Chaikin in his landmark book, A Man on the Moon. That effect was most acute when the craft was flying over the limb of the Moon and at its weakest when it was over the geographical centre of the near side. "If planners could predict the pattern of Doppler shifts," Chaikin wrote, "they could compare that information with the actual shifts they detected. The differences would in turn reveal whether the lunar module was off course and by how much." This was the mathematical solution, but the problem remained of how to provide it in a form which could be fed into the guidance computer. It was decided essentially to "fool" the computer into thinking that the landing point had moved. It was an elegant ruse because, as Chaikin observed, it "required entering only a single number."

Touching down with precision and so close to another spacecraft on only the second manned lunar landing was daring in the extreme. In planning the first landing, the site selectors had avoided craters. However, Surveyor 3 had landed amongst a nest of craters and was actually on the inner wall of a crater about 650 feet (200 meters) in diameter. Nevertheless, the geologists were delighted, because they wanted the astronauts to inspect and sample those craters. Assuming that Conrad and Bean managed to land within walking distance of Surveyor 3, they would examine the lander's condition after more than two years on the Moon and remove its television camera and various other components. They would also assemble an Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) and perform extensive geological exploration of their landing site.

When a tentative planning schedule for future flights was published by NASA on 29 July 1969, it showed that Apollo 12 had now moved back a couple of months to mid-November to accommodate planning for the precision landing. Not everyone was blinkered to the reality of how difficult these mission were, however. "Though the flight of Apollo 12 may seem like history relived," Time told its readers on 24 October, "the second American effort to land men on the Moon should be almost as dramatic as its predecessor. It will demand every bit as much daring from its all-Navy crew."

If the Apollo 11 crew had been amiable strangers, then the men of Apollo 12 were best buddies, even before their NASA days. Chaikin tells the story of a friendship cultivated with Jim Rathmann, a car dealer in Cocoa Beach, whose contacts within General Motors allowed him to get them three matching gold Corvettes, the license plates of which were emblazoned with their respective crew positions: CDR for Conrad, CMP for Gordon, and LMP for Bean. Another anecdote is that Conrad—a long-time collector of baseball caps—tried to get a huge blue-and-white one that would fit over the helmet of his space suit; he then intended to bounce in front of the television camera on the lunar surface to give his audience a chuckle. Unfortunately, he could not think of a way of sneaking it aboard the spacecraft.

The humor also did not detract from the respect in which Conrad, Gordon, and Bean were held as one of the sharpest crews in the simulator. Their naval backgrounds had already led them to choose the name "Yankee Clipper" for the command and service modules and "Intrepid" for the lunar module, from a selection of names submitted by workers at North American and Grumman respectively. The Yankee Clipper name, in fact, had been submitted by George Glacken, a senior flight test engineer at North American; he felt that such ships of old had "majestically sailed the high seas with pride and prestige for a new America." Intrepid came from Grumman planner Robert Lambert, who felt that it denoted "this nation's resolute determination for continued exploration of space, stressing our astronauts' fortitude and endurance of hardship in man's continuing experiences for enlarging his Universe."

Apollo 12 crewmen (from left) Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad, and Al Bean listen to instructions, ahead of a water egress training exercise in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo Credit: NASA

The over-indulgence of the Navy theme, however, may have proven a little too much for the Apollo 12 backup crew—Dave Scott, Al Worden, and Jim Irwin—who all happened to be Air Force officers!

The morning of 14 November 1969 dawned cold, cloudy, and drizzly at the Kennedy Space Center. Weather reconnaissance had already identified a front of rain showers 80 miles (130 km) to the north and moving southward; coupled with broken, low clouds and overcast conditions at 9,800 feet (3,000 meters), it seemed inevitable to some that the launch would be postponed. As Conrad, Gordon, and Bean ate breakfast, the storm clouds rolled overhead, and later, as they lay in their couches aboard Yankee Clipper, they could see trickles of rainwater on the window. Somehow, it had worked its way underneath the spacecraft's boost protective cover. "The weather was erratic," wrote Andrew Chaikin. "The skies would seem to clear for a time and then gloom over again." Still, there were no predictions of thunderstorms or severe turbulence in the area and all of the conditions were "better" than the minimum requirements specified in launch safety rules: cloud ceilings were acceptable, wind speeds within limits, and no lightning for 20 miles (30 km). As Launch Director Walter Kapryan deliberated whether or not to proceed, Pete Conrad lightened the mood by announcing that the Navy was always ready to do NASA's all-weather testing for it.

It was a statement he would live to regret.

Barely an hour before the scheduled 11:22 a.m. EST launch, a liquid oxygen replenishment pump failed, but the mission was cleared to fly on its backup. With more than 3,000 invited guests in attendance, including President Richard Nixon, Apollo 12 took flight precisely on schedule and quickly disappeared into the low deck of murky clouds. Pete Conrad reported the completion of the "roll program" maneuver, then added that "this baby's really going!" From their seats, the three men were astonished when, 30 seconds into the ascent, a bright flash illuminated the cabin, accompanied by a loud roar of static in their headsets … and then the wail of the master alarm. Glancing at the instrument panel, Conrad was shocked to see more red and yellow warning lights than he had ever seen in his life. He had seen maybe three or four warning lights glow during simulations, but this looked like a Christmas tree. Even the worst training run had not shown up so many failures.

Mounted atop the Saturn V booster, Apollo 12 inches its way out of the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on 8 September 1969, bound for Pad 39A. Photo Credit: NASA

It seemed that something had gone horribly wrong with the spacecraft's electrical system: momentarily, all three fuel cells went down, the AC power buses died, and the ship's gyroscopic platform tumbled out of control. "Okay," Conrad announced calmly to Mission Control, "we just lost the platform, gang. I don't know what happened here; we had everything in the world drop out." But what had happened? The crew was mystified. Al Bean, seated in the right-hand couch, guessed that something had severed the electrical connections between the command module and the service module, which contained the fuel cells … but, then again, the gauges were at least showing that Yankee Clipper was still drawing power, albeit at a greatly reduced rate.

What the astronauts did not know was that the Saturn V had been twice hit by lightning. In fact, the first strike, which came 36.5 seconds after liftoff, was clearly visible to spectators on the ground. The strike had hit the vehicle, traveled down the long plume of flame, and ionised gases of its exhaust all the way to the launch pad! At 1.2 miles (2 km) long, it had set a new record for the Saturn V: making it the world's longest lightning rod. "Apollo 12 had created its own lightning," wrote Tom Stafford in his autobiography, We Have Capture, "when this huge, ionized gas plume from the first-stage engines opened an electrical path to the ground." Yankee Clipper's systems shut themselves down in response to this massive electrical surge, and a second strike, some 52 seconds into the ascent, knocked out the gyroscopes. Automatic cameras close to Pad 39A recorded both strikes.

Immediately after the shutdowns, the command module automatically transitioned to backup battery power. Almost immediately, Conrad began to suspect that lightning was to blame. As the mission commander, the decision was his to make: he could abort several hundred million dollars of hardware and splash into the ocean a few minutes later … or he could hold out and wind up in orbit with a dead spacecraft. Neither option appealed. With these considerations in mind, it is unsurprising that Conrad opted to ride it out as long as possible.

Fortunately, the Saturn's guidance system was working perfectly and kept them on a smooth track into orbit. At this point, Conrad reported that he suspected a lightning strike to have caused the power dropout. Meanwhile, Gerry Griffin, seated in the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas, was undertaking his first stint as a flight director and was almost certain that he would soon be forced to call an abort. If Apollo 12 wound up in Earth orbit with a dead spacecraft, then the crew would be as good as dead. Before doing so, however, he asked John Aaron, the 24-year-old electrical, environmental, and communications officer ("EECOM"), for his recommendation.

Aaron's computer screen showed a jumble of numbers … but he had encountered a similar problem during a training run a year earlier in which the power had been inadvertently removed from the spacecraft, and thought he knew how to resolve it. "Flight," he called to Griffin, "try SCE to Aux." Neither Griffin nor Capcom Gerry Carr had the foggiest notion what this switch meant, and when it was radioed to Apollo 12, neither did Pete Conrad. In fact, it was Al Bean who recognized the switch for the Signal Conditioning Equipment and moved it to the Auxiliary position. Immediately, data reappeared on the screens in Mission Control. The crew was instructed to bring the fuel cells back online by activating their reset switches. "The whole thing," concluded Nancy Conrad, "had taken less than 30 seconds."

In drizzle and with ominous thunderstorms and lightning in the area, Apollo 12 takes flight on 14 November 1969. Photo Credit: NASA

The SCE converted raw signals from the instrumentation into data which was usable by Yankee Clipper's displays, and Aaron had correctly deduced that it had gone offline following a major electrical surge. In Conrad's mind, two men had effectively saved the mission: Al Bean, by finding and acting on the SCE-to-Aux instruction, and John Aaron for making the call which restored control. Gradually, as Bean brought the fuel cells and electrical buses back online, the warning lights blinked off. When Apollo 12 reached orbit, Dick Gordon set to work taking star sightings and punching numbers into the guidance computer, recovering and realigning the internal navigational platform with just moments to spare before the spacecraft emerged from the Earth's shadow.

However, there were still no guarantees that the mission was out of the woods. No one knew if the lunar module Intrepid had been damaged by the electrical surge, and there would be no means of checking its systems until after transposition and docking … which itself had to occur after the make-or-break Translunar Injection (TLI) burn for the Moon. "I listened while Griffin was briefed by his experts," wrote Chris Kraft in his autobiography, Flight. "The lunar module was probably unscathed, they told him. But nobody knew for sure. Go or no-go? It was a decision that only Flight could make. Gerry Griffin made it … one of the gutsiest decisions in all of Apollo and I was proud of it."

Halfway through their second orbit, with everything returned to normal, the Saturn V's S-IVB third stage was reignited to commence the three-day journey to the Moon. Shortly thereafter, Gordon uncoupled Yankee Clipper and performed the transposition and docking with Intrepid, extracting the spider-like lunar module from the Saturn's final stage. "Everything's tickety-boo," Conrad reported, but to make sure, later that afternoon he and Bean opened the tunnel and completed a quick inspection of their lander. None of its electrical equipment had been damaged by the power surge, and by now the astronauts were in such high spirits that they even asked Mission Control to replay the voice communications from those first few, adrenaline-fed seconds of launch. It had been a hairy start for Apollo 12 and had demonstrated that a journey to the Moon could never be routine.

 

 

November 10th, 2013

Remembering Apollo 12: The Surveyor Crater and the Belly of the Snowman (Part 2)

By Ben Evans

 

Eerie perspective of one of the Apollo 12 astronauts at work with the Apollo Lunar Hand Tool (ALHT) on the desolate Ocean of Storms. Photo Credit: NASA

Rocketing our fleshy bodies into space has never—and, some might say, can never—be truly routine, and certainly rocketing our fleshy bodies out of Earth's gravitational well and charting a course for our nearest celestial neighbor, the Moon, carries enormous risk and has only been attempted nine times in human history. As recounted in yesterday's history article, Apollo 12 astronauts Charles "Pete" Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Al Bean endured a hair-raising opening to their November 1969 mission, when the Saturn V booster was twice struck by lightning seconds after liftoff, leaving them with the prospect of a dead spacecraft. Thankfully, the timely actions of Mission Control and the crew had brought the command and service module Yankee Clipper back to life, and the three men proceeded with their three-day journey to the Moon.

That journey, across 240,000 miles (370,000 km), was punctuated by the sounds of Earth, including country music cassettes carried by Conrad and Bean and The Archies' bubblegum hit "Sugar, Sugar," sneaked aboard by Gordon. Four days after launch, at 8:47 a.m. EST on 18 November, Yankee Clipper and Intrepid entered lunar orbit. Conrad and Bean floated through the connecting tunnel to begin preparing the lander for the descent to the surface at Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms, the following day. Everything seemed to be going well, although Conrad and Bean's biomedical sensors seemed unwilling to co-operate: Conrad's were causing his skin to blister, and those of Bean were producing erratic signals. Both men removed, cleaned, and reattached the electrodes without further incident and finished donning their space suits in readiness for undocking and Powered Descent. Gordon gave them a few words of last-minute advice: "Let's go over this again, Pete," he grinned. "The gas is on the right; the brake is on the left!" With this last spell of banter behind them, Intrepid and Yankee Clipper parted company at 11:16:03 p.m. EST on 18 November, beginning a 2.5-hour sweeping curve to the Ocean of Storms.

Understanding the nature of the terrain upon which Conrad and Bean would walk was aided by the presence of the unmanned Surveyor 3 landing craft, which, after bouncing several times, had touched down on the inner slope of a crater on 19 April 1967 and then transmitted a series of remarkable photographs of its surroundings. The landing site was located on photographs taken from orbit by one of the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft flown between 1966-67 to extensively map the Moon and reconnoitre potential landing sites for Apollo.

Stunning view of Earth, captured by the Apollo 12 crew. Photo Credit: NASA

"Ewen Whitaker … was a member of the Surveyor team," wrote Eric Jones in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, "and had the responsibility of identifying the landing sites. As the first pictures came in from Surveyor 3, it was immediately apparent that the spacecraft had landed in a crater. It was a relatively featureless crater, but there were a number of good-sized rocks scattered around, particularly to the north of the spacecraft. One pair of large rocks looked as though they were almost touching each other and it seemed to Whitaker that he might be able to find them when he started to examine the appropriate Orbiter pictures through the microscope. Within a couple of days, he was sure he had them; the rocks looked like mere pinpricks through the microscope, but there were other rocks visible as well and they made a pattern which matched up nicely with the Surveyor 3 pictures. Whitaker had found the crater."

The 650-foot (200-meter) crater would come to be known as "Surveyor Crater," and it formed part of a somewhat distinctive cluster, which, when viewed from Conrad and Bean's angle of approach, closely resembled a fat snowman with the unmanned probe sitting squarely within its belly. By using Lunar Orbiter images and photographs taken by the Apollo 8, 10, and 11 crews, it was possible for trajectory planners to construct a fairly realistic topographical model of the region in which Intrepid would land. Indeed, during training the televised view through Conrad's left-hand window would be so realistic that, on landing day, 19 November, he would be astounded at how well the planners had done their jobs.

To better familiarise themselves with the spot, the astronauts had given nicknames to the other craters which outlined other parts of the snowman's body: Head, Left Foot, and Right Foot, to identify just a handful. Conrad hoped to land in what looked to be a relatively flat, smooth place close to Surveyor Crater—he called it "Pete's Parking Lot"—but, either way, he knew that he had to touch down relatively close to target to allow them to walk over to the probe without difficulty.

Still, it was with some scepticism, therefore, that Intrepid and Yankee Clipper parted company, for none of the astronauts were entirely convinced that the trajectory planners would indeed bring them directly down toward Surveyor Crater. Earlier that day, as he tucked into a breakfast of Canadian bacon, Conrad told Bean: "I don't know what I'm gonna see when I pitch over. You know, I'm either gonna say 'Aaaaaa! There it is!' or I'm gonna say 'Freeze it, I don't recognise nothin'!'"

Photographed by Dick Gordon, the lunar module Intrepid heads toward Powered Descent and a touchdown on the Ocean of Storms. Photo Credit: NASA

After undocking, Gordon had tracked them against an endless backdrop of craters with the command module's 28-power sextant until they disappeared from view. On the far side of the Moon, during their 13th orbit, Intrepid's descent engine roared to life for 29 seconds to reduce their perilune altitude to just 9 miles (15 km). Passing over Mare Nectaris, the lander flew on its "back," with the descent engine pointing along the flight path, then, under computer control, pitched over until it was almost vertical and the two men were granted their first glimpse of the lunar landscape beneath them. They were astonished. Despite all their doubts, there was the snowman, right ahead of them.

"I think I see my crater," Conrad told Bean. "I'm not sure." At first, it looked like a maze, but then he caught sight of it and blurted out: "There it is! Son-of-a-gun, right down the middle of the road!" A conversation a few weeks earlier with trajectory specialist Dave Reed had led him to request a touchdown in the Surveyor Crater; but now, as he beheld the landscape for real, Conrad decided to shift his aim-point a little shorter and to the north—in other words, directly into Pete's Parking Lot. From his vantage point, the area looked more like a battlefield, and Conrad began making adjustments with his hand controller, pitching Intrepid backward slightly to reduce their forward velocity, passing around Surveyor Crater's northern rim, and eyeballing a smooth spot to the north-west, close to Head Crater.

Moving lower now, with barely 100 feet (30 meters) to go, the descent engine began to kick up so much dust that it obscured the landing site. In the strange airless environment that he and Bean were preparing to visit, the dust did not billow around, but shot radially outward in bright streaks. As he "felt" his way down using only rocks sticking up through the sheet of dust, he was relying on both eyeballs through the window and Bean's reading of the instruments. Sometime around 1:54 a.m. EST on 19 November 1969, one of Intrepid's footpads found alien soil and the Lunar Contact light glowed blue. Instantly, Conrad's hand went to the Engine Stop button and the lander dropped the last half-meter or so to the surface.

"Good landing, Pete!" yelled Bean. "Out-standing, man!"

The Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid (left) and the yawning bowl of Surveyor crater beyond illustrate the outstanding achievement of NASA's trajectory planners in guiding Conrad and Bean to a precision landing point. Photo Credit: NASA

Conrad knew that he was close to Surveyor Crater, but since there was no window in the back of Intrepid's cabin, he had no way of knowing exactly how far away they were from its rim. The landmarks which had seemed so obvious during the final minutes of descent were now less conspicuous. They knew that Head Crater should have been directly in front of them, but it took them some time digesting the scene to finally realize that, yes, there it was. They were close to its eastern rim and were looking directly away from the sunlight of the early lunar morning, and with a lack of color variation the crater was hard to see.

It was actually Dick Gordon, in orbit aboard Yankee Clipper, who managed to nail down their co-ordinates. During his first overhead pass, he spotted the snowman … and then saw Intrepid's long shadow. "He's on the Surveyor Crater!" Gordon jubilantly told Mission Control. "He's about a fourth of the Surveyor Crater diameter to the north-west … I'll tell you, he's the only thing that casts a shadow down there." A few seconds later, he added, with clear excitement in his voice, that he could see Surveyor 3 itself. The eastern wall of the crater was in shadow, but the body of the unmanned lander was catching the Sun. In fact, Conrad and Bean had set their lander down a mere 530 feet (163 meters) from the old craft, which by any measure was a precision landing.

Their next task was to go outside, and they could not resist a chuckle when Capcom Gerry Carr advised them to rest before their first walk on alien soil. "After all the training, preparation, the dreams and visions of humankind for thousands of years," wrote Conrad's second wife, Nancy, in her book Rocketman, "and here they were, the third and fourth in the history of the species to set foot on this thing … and you expect us to sit down for a smoke break?" As with Armstrong on Apollo 11, the chance to rest had been conservatively built into their schedule to allow for the possibility of the descent to the surface being delayed by one orbit; but now that they were here, Conrad elected to begin EVA-1 at the earliest opportunity.

Like a couple of children eager to go outside and play in the snow, he and Bean proceeded through the two-hour effort to don their suits. Four and a half hours after landing, they made one final check and Conrad radioed Houston for permission to depressurize Intrepid's cabin.

"Houston, are we Go for EVA?"

"Stand by, Intrepid. We'll be right with you," replied Capcom Ed Gibson.

"Stand by?" asked Conrad, incredulously. "You guys oughtta be spring-loaded!"

Seconds later, after checking the status boards, Gibson gave them the go-ahead, and as the final wisps of oxygen left the cabin the astronauts were in a near-pure vacuum. Within minutes, Conrad had squeezed himself through the hatch and onto the porch. He drew the lanyard to deploy the Modular Equipment Storage Assembly (MESA) on the side of the descent stage, on which was the television camera, and then dropped down the ladder and onto the surface.

Without doubt, Oriana Fallaci's comment about astronauts being unable to speak for themselves popped into his mind. Conrad was the second-shortest astronaut in the corps and he had a $500 bet to win, so he spoke: "Whoopie! That may have been a small one for Neil, but it's a long one for me!"

 

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