San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Bean, last living Apollo 12 crew member, dies
Astronaut Alan Bean, the fourth person to step foot on the moon and an accomplished artist of lunar landscapes sprinkled with moon dust, died Saturday at Houston Methodist Hospital.
Family members said Bean, 86, the last living member of the Apollo 12 crew, suffered from a brief illness after traveling in Indiana two weeks ago.
Bean was born in Wheeler in the Texas Panhandle, and grew up in Fort Worth. He graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in aeronautical engineering.
Bean’s remarkable 18-year career at NASA included 69 days in space and 31 hours on the moon’s surface.
His first journey to the moon took place in November 1969, just four months after the historic Apollo 11 landing with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Bean’s quick thinking helped keep the Apollo 12 mission on track, said Herb Baker, a former manager of the operation support office at Johnson Space Center.
Lightning struck the Yankee Clipper shortly after liftoff during a thunderstorm at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With the capsule hurtling about 5,000 mph spaceward, all the warning lights on the instrument panel lit up. The Yankee Clipper’s main power was gone. Mission control sent a somewhat cryptic message to flip the “SCE to AUX,” or backup mode. There were more than 100 switches on the control panel. Neither of his co-pilots knew where to look. But Bean knew where the switch was and brought the power back. If the crew had not found the switch, they would have had to abort the Apollo 12 mission.
On Nov. 19, 1969, Bean and Apollo 12 commander Conrad landed on the Ocean of Storms and he became the fourth human to set foot on the moon. During two moonwalks, Bean helped deploy several surface experiments and installed the first nuclear-powered generator station.
Bean was commander on the second Skylab mission, where he spent 60 days living in space, from July 29 to Sept. 25, 1973. While there he tested a prototype of a Manned Maneurvering Unit and took one spacewalk outside the Skylab.
Bean retired from NASA in 1981 and went on to create artwork that garnered hundreds of thousands of dollars.
More than 40 of his works were displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 2009 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 and 12 moon landings.