Posted on November 19, 2020

There have only been 12 humans, ever, to walk on the Moon. And all 12 of them were white American men!!

Key Points

Since the days of Apollo, American astronauts have become at least somewhat more inclusive and more representative of the variety of humans: white women and both men and women of color have become NASA astronauts and traveled to space. Also, loads of Soviet and Russian cosmonauts and quite a few astronauts from other nations have gone into space. At the time of writing, 18 different countries have sent scientist-astronauts to the International Space Station.

The astronauts who launched just a few days ago on the
Space X Crew Dragon spacecraft are three NASA
astronauts (which include a woman and a black man)
and a JAXA (Japan’s space agency) astronaut.

But none of these post-Apollo space-farers have ever gone as far as the Moon, let alone landed and walked around on another world. No human has walked on the Moon since 1972.

Given the fact that going to the Moon has been so rare, I wonder why we don’t all know every single one of the moonwalkers? Many of us could answer the question, “Who was the first person to step onto the Moon?” (Neil Armstrong), and some of us even know “Who joined Armstrong about ten or fifteen minutes after that first step?” (Buzz Aldrin). That first lunar landing, which occurred in July of 1969, seems to be the one everyone talks about.

But another moonwalk began on this date in November of 1969. And I couldn’t have told you who the astronauts were – and I bet you don’t know, either!

But all that ends now: The Apollo 12 astronauts who landed and then walked on the Moon were Pete Conrad and Alan Bean.

Pete Conrad is on the left, and Alan Bean is on the right.
Dick Gordon, in the center, stayed with the Command
Module in lunar orbit – so he went “to” the Moon but didn’t
land “on” it.

The mission was mostly a success:

They landed where they expected, on the Moon’s surface, close to a robotic probe that had landed about two and a half years before. They were able to visit that probe and remove some parts to return to Earth for analysis.

They took two moonwalks, collected rocks, set up equipment to make and relay various measurements, took photographs. The dozens of experiments that they were able to set up sent back data to Earth for almost a decade!

They were able to lift off from the Moon after two days, dock with the command module that was circling the Moon, and then fly back to Earth for a successful splashdown.

One boo-boo on the mission was that the astronauts had the first color television camera on the Moon, but Bean accidentally pointed the camera at the Sun, and – well, it fried! So there was basically zero TV footage of this second lunar exploration!

CBS already had a plan in case something like that happened, and it showed a simulated moonwalk filmed in a studio, with two actors in spacesuits. And NBC had astronaut marionettes acting out the motions, courtesy of puppeteer Bil Baird. Audiences heard the real astronauts’ voices while watching these simulations, and the word “Simulation” was right there on the screen – but some people didn’t realize that they weren’t WATCHING the real deal!

(And decades later, some people came to believe a conspiracy theory that humans have never walked on the Moon. Having simulations involving studios with actors and puppets, on one mission, probably fueled some of that conspiracy nonsense.)

Another Bean boo-boo: Even without motion pictures, we do of course have a lot of still photographs from Apollo 12’s moonwalks. However, we don’t have quite as many pics as we should, because Alan Bean somehow left several rolls of exposed film on the lunar surface!

Yikes!

But we do have some really nice photos…

…And Alan Bean later made an alt-reality painting, which he named Fantasy. In this picture, he paints Command Module Pilot Dick Gordon in the center, between Bean and Conrad. Gordon has his arms wide open in surprise, as if he’s asking “How did I get down here?” – because of course in reality he had stayed up in the Command Module, in lunar orbit, while Bean and Conrad had landed and moonwalked.