Bean tells of 'good news, bad news' at start up of moon shoot

By Cat Mauldin -  The Cannon Beach Gazette
(NASA moon photos are from Apollo 12 mission.)

When NASA officials first made plans to go to the moon, it was a classic case of good news, bad news. That’s the story told by Captain Alan Bean, an astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon.  Captain. Bean was in Cannon Beach for the  Stormy Weather Arts Festival, and he spoke Nov. 3 to a packed house at Coaster Theater.

“The bad news was nobody knew anything,” said Capt. Bean, astronaut
turned artist who makes his home in Houston, Texas. “The more I watched the more I realized that there weren’t a lot of geniuses around, and that most of the guys in the room weren’t any smarter than I was.”

The good news, Capt. Bean discovered, was that although none of the engineers, Navy pilots, NASA officials and other scientists gathered to put a man on the moon had done anything extraordinary in the past, together they could do something extraordinary in the future.

“We discount ourselves sometimes,” Capt. Bean told the audience. “But we can all do extraordinary things if we believe in ourselves.”

A Navy test pilot, Capt. Bean was among those chosen to go to the moon. Training was  interesting, to say the least, as everything was new — for everyone. Nobody was quite sure how to train for movement on the moon’s surface, which has one-sixth the gravity of earth. The first attempts to train put the astronauts in a lifting harness contraption, which Bean said didn’t
work at all. (Photo: Bean pilots the lunal lander down to the Oceanus  Procellarum , or Ocean of Storms.)

 “It lifted the (space) suit but not me,” recalled Capt. Bean. “I said ‘let’s pad this ... this hurts!’.”  But numerous alterations to the lift system never did work. Underwater tests were dangerous, and still didn’t work quite right.

“But we learned as we went,” said Capt. Bean. “We knew it would be tough. Anytime you try anything worthwhile, you know it’s going to be tough.”

And there were losses. The first crew died in a fire on the launch pad. It made everyone at NASA realize the dangers involved.

“But people were able to solve those problems,” said Capt. Bean. “Humans are able to do so  much, and impossible dreams can be made into reality.”

From a young age, Bean’s dreams had centered around being a Navy pilot. Now NASA officials were asking him to be an explorer, something he figured he could do with little effort or training.

“They asked us how we’d know which rocks to pick up and bring back from the moon,” explained Capt. Bean. “We just figured we’d pick up rocks. We told them ‘we’re pilots. We don’t want to be geologists.’ We told them we don’t even like rocks.”

But that comment caused NASA officials to question the pilots’ qualifications as astronauts, so Capt. Bean and his colleagues rethought their objections.

“After a while we decided to learn to be geologists,” said Bean. “We learned to be explorers on the moon.”

It wasn’t easy. What worked during training on earth didn’t always work on the moon. Capt. Bean and his moon-landing partner, astronaut Cmdr. Charles Conrad Jr., had planned to use a remote camera with a delayed shutter to take a staged landing photo.

“We’d done it a hundred times in training exercises on earth,” recalled Capt. Bean. “But on the moon, the dirt was so tenacious and the shadows so deep, I couldn’t find the auto release on the camera.”

Capt. Bean, who retired from NASA in 1981 to devote his time to art, has since painted “The Fabulous Photo We Never Took.”

He’s devoted the last two decades to telling his stories, and those of other astronauts, through his art. Having been the only artist to travel in space and walk the moon, Capt. Bean figures he’s fairly well qualified.

“I figured I could leave the space program and no one would miss me,” explained Capt. Bean.  “Only 12 men walked on the moon, but all Americans contributed to the success of the mission.  And I wanted to try to preserve the legacy.”

He says Americans went to the moon for all the right reasons, and the inscription left there “We came in peace for all mankind,” is testament to that. He also says going to the moon gave him a new appreciation for the earth, which he describes as the Garden of Eden.

“We couldn’t wait to get to the moon, but earth is the most beautiful place,” said Capt. Bean, who developed a new perspective when he splashed into the Pacific Ocean after his Apollo 12 mission. “The ocean, the sky, the aircraft carrier that picked us up ... I’d seen all these things before but suddenly they looked so beautiful. Because I’d had 10 days on the moon and in space, and I was looking at these things with alien eyes. I had a new appreciation for things.”

He considers himself incredibly fortunate, and says he never complains about anything because of that good fortune.

Capt. Bean hopes to inspire people with his stories and paintings and says that — unlike the stars and planets in a fixed orbit — humans can’t be controlled by anything but themselves.

 “No one places limits on you other than the limits you place on yourself,” said Capt. Bean. “It’s a great gift we’ve been given. We’re very special that way. The problem is, we don’t come with an instruction book so we don’t know how to harness that specialness.”

He suggests that the best way is to live each day to the fullest, and not waste any.

“We all have dreams for ourselves,” said Capt. Bean. “They are just as important as the dreams of Apollo. And we all have the opportunity to make those dreams come true. This isn’t a rehearsal ... this is it!”

Original source

Text and Bean doing painting photo (C) 2001 The Cannon Beach Gazette
Reprinted by permission