Not Suitable For Long-Duration Flight
Pete Conrad was born June 2nd, 1930, in Philadelphia, just prior to the Great Depression. Pete struggled continuously with his schoolwork, suffering from dyslexia, a condition little understood at the time. After failing most of his 11th-grade exams, Pete was expelled from school.
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His mother refused to believe her son could do no better, and in searching for an answer, found Darrow School in New York. There, Pete, proving that mothers know best, learnt how to apply a modified approach to his education, and thus found a way to work around his dyslexia. Pete repeated the 11th-grade, but at such a high level of academic performance, that after graduating in 1949, he was admitted to Princeton University, and awarded a full Navy ROTC scholarship.
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Since the age of 15, Pete worked his summers at the Paoli Airfield, Pennsylvania, bartering odd jobs for airplane flights and occasional instructional time, learning all he could about aircraft and their power plants.
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When he was 16, Pete jumped in a car and drove 100 miles to help a flight instructor who was forced to make an emergency landing in a field. Pete patched up the aircraft single-handedly, and the instructor was able to fly his plane out. In a show of appreciation, the instructor gave Pete all the flight lessons needed to earn his pilot's certificate.
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Conrad continued flying in college, earning an instrument rating, and graduating with a degree in aeronautical engineering from Princeton in 1953, and commissioned an Ensign in the U.S. Navy as a Naval ROTC graduate
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Pete was sent to Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, for flight training, and designated a Naval Aviator in September of 1954. Excelling in flight school, Pete served for several years as an aircraft carrier-based aviator, and flight instructor at Navy flight schools based along the Gulf of Mexico.
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Pete applied to and was accepted to the United States Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, where he first met future fellow astronauts Wally Schirra and Jim Lovell. He graduated in 1958 and was then invited to take part in the selection process for the first group of astronauts for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (the "Mercury Seven").
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Conrad was not a big fan of the medical and psychological testing performed on the astronaut applicants at the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico. During a Rorschach inkblot test, Pete told the psychiatrist that one blot card revealed a sexual encounter complete with long lurid detail. When shown a blank card, he turned it around, pushed it back and replied, "It's upside down”.
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When Pete was asked to deliver a stool sample to the lab, he carefully placed it in a gift box, and tied a red ribbon around it, delivering it as requested. And finally. with his frustrations at a boiling point, Pete dropped his full enema bag right on the desk of the clinic's commanding officer, then walked straight out. Subsequently, Pete's initial application to NASA was denied with the notation that he was “Not Suitable For Long-Duration Flight”
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Pete returned to the Navy flying the F-4 Phantom II with VF-96, off the USS Ranger. Shortly after, NASA announced their search for a second group of astronauts had commenced, and Alan Shepard, who knew Conrad from their time as test pilots, approached Conrad and persuaded him to reapply. This time, Pete was selected to join NASA in June 1962.
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Pete flew as pilot on Gemini 5, (which Pete unceremoniously named “ Flying Garbage Can”) along with "Gordo" Cooper, where the two set a new crew space duration record of 7 days, 22 hours and 55 minutes. Conrad then flew again on Gemini 11 with Richard Gordon.
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On November 14th, 1969, Apollo 12 launched away from Cape Kennedy under Conrad's command, Dick Gordon as CM Pilot, and Alan Bean as LM Pilot. The mission got off to a somewhat rocky start when lightning struck the Saturn V rocket 36.5 seconds after lift-off, triggered by the launch vehicle itself, discharging down to the surface through the ionized exhaust plume. Protective circuits on the fuel cells in the service module (SM) detected overloads and took all three fuel cells offline, along with much of the command and service module (CSM) instrumentation.
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12 seconds later, their rocket suffered a second lighting strike that knocked out the "8-ball" attitude indicator at T+ thirty-seven seconds into launch,
“What the hell was that?” asked Gordon.
“Okay, we just lost the platform gang,” reported Conrad, “I don’t know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out.”
“Flight, try SCE to ‘AUX'”,... but nobody knew what the heck he was talking about.
Pete Conrad’s response was, “What the hell is that?”
Apollo astronaut Alan Bean remembered the location of the SCE switch, flipped it to auxiliary, and all Telemetry was immediately restored, saving the mission.
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There was a chance that the lightning may have caused the explosive bolts on the Command Module's parachute compartment to fire prematurely, rendering the parachutes useless on their return home, but it was decided not to let the Apollo 12 crew members worry about it. So they didn't.
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After a successful trans-lunar injection burn, LM Separation and descent...Pete actually landed Intrepid 580 feet short of "Pete's Parking Lot", due to an area of rougher surface conditions during final approach than anticipated, and was a little under 1,180 feet from Surveyor 3. Imagine that...walking distance. Conrad stepped down the ladder to the lunar surface on November 19th, 1969, and said:
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"Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me."
Apollo 12 Commander Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. - Ocean of Storms (November 19, 1969)
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Conrad and Bean achieved such a precise landing at their expected location, within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 robotic probe, which had landed on April 20, 1967, that in doing so, they showed that NASA could plan future missions in the expectation that astronauts could land close to sites of scientific interest. Conrad and Bean carried the first color television camera taken by an Apollo mission to the lunar surface, but transmission was lost after Bean accidentally pointed the camera at the Sun and its sensor was destroyed, all in the effort to conceal the mission was in fact being filmed on...(Redacted)
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Pete Conrad, and fellow Apollo 12 moonwalker, Alan Bean also had the proud distinction of unwittingly being the first person to bring porn to the Moon.
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The all-Navy prime crew and the all-Air Force backup crew managed to insert the nude photos of Playboy bunnys into the astronauts' lunar wrist checklist. Pete's had a cartoon inscribed with "SEEN ANY INTERESTING HILLS & VALLEYS ?"
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Yankee Clipper returned to Earth with Pete, and his crew of Apollo 12 on November 24th, 1969, at 20:58 UTC, in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 500 nautical miles east of American Samoa. During splashdown, a 16mm film camera dislodged from storage and struck Bean in the forehead, rendering him briefly unconscious.
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Thankfully the explosive bolts on the Command Module's parachute compartment were not damaged by that lighting strike after launch, and the capsule descended under three good chutes. After recovery by USS Hornet, the crew of Apollo 12 were flown to Pago Pago International in Tafuna for a reception.
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Pete’s last mission to space was as Commander of Skylab 2, where much like he saved that flight instructor's airplane stuck in a field so many years before, Pete managed to repair a damaged portion of Skylab on two spacewalks and saved the space station. For his actions, Pete Conrad was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
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In 1976, Pete became president of McDonnell Douglas, and on February 14th, 1996, launched on a record-breaking around the world flight in a Learjet owned by Bill Daniels. The flight was successfully completed in 49 hours, 26 minutes and 8 seconds.
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Pete flew west on July 8th, 1999 and was buried with full honours at Arlington National Cemetery with many of his fellow Apollo astronauts in attendance.
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After Conrad's death, NASA planted a tree in his honour at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. A grove of trees that have been planted there to honor the memory of the astronauts who have flown west. During the dedication ceremony for the tree planted in Pete’s honour, fellow Apollo 12 crewmate Alan Bean, jokingly said that Conrad wanted NASA to light his tree every Christmas season with colored lights instead of the plain white used for all the others. The reason for this was in keeping with one of Pete's mottos
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"When you can't be good, be colorful”.
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Every Christmas since that day, all of the trees in the grove at NASA’s Space Center have been lit with white lights, except Conrad's tree…that one is lit bright red.
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Pictured - Eclipse of the Sun taken from the Apollo 12 spacecraft during its trans-Earth journey home from the Moon
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