Apollo 12 is struck by lightning

After the success of Apollo 11, the immediate future of the US space program was a mission every two months. Apollo 12 launched on 14 November 1969. The CSM was named Yankee Clipper, the LEM Intrepid; the crew were Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon and Al Bean. Intrepid was intended to land near an unmanned probe, Surveyor III which, had been on the moon for 31 months. Hamish Lindsay:

Chris Kraft, the Director of Flight Operations said, “Launch has always been an uneasy time for me, and I have always looked forward to a successful separation from the booster. When one adds to this an apprehension caused by bad weather over the Cape, I become even more concerned.”

President and Mrs Nixon were among the large crowd waiting to see the launch, the only time an American President in office witnessed an Apollo launch. As if to prepare this crew of navy aviators for the Ocean of Storms, the launch area was blanketed by rain when Apollo 12 launched into the overcast stratocumulus cloud with a ceiling of only 640 metres above the ground. Rising from Pad 39A at 11.22 am EST in defiance of Mission Rule 1–404, which said no vehicle shall be launched in a thunderstorm, the huge Saturn V vanished into the murk. Observers then saw two bright blue streaks of lightning – right where the rocket had been. Pete Conrad showed why top test pilots are different from the rest of us when 36seconds after liftoff, at a height of 1,859 metres, they were hit by lightning. At 52 seconds they were hit again. The control panel indicators went haywire and the attitude ball began pitching. If the vehicle really was beginning to fly erratically there were only seconds before it would break up and explode.

The abort handle was waiting at Conrad’s elbow, but he calmly announced to the ground controllers, “Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out… fuel cell, lights, and AC Bus overload, one and two, main bus A and B out. Where are we going?”

With the master alarm ringing in his ears, Alan Bean thought he knew all the spacecraft’s electrical faults, but looking along the panel of glowing warning lights he couldn’t recognise any of them – he had never seen so many lights before.

Conrad remembers, “I had a pretty good idea what had happened. I had the only window at the time – the booster protector covered the other windows – and I saw a little glow outside and a crackle in the headphones and, of course, the master caution and warning alarms came on immediately and I glanced up at the panel and in all the simulations they had ever done they had figured out how to light all eleven electrical warning lights at once – by Golly, they were all lit, so I knew right away that this was for real.

“Our high bit rate telemetry had fallen off the line so on the ground they weren’t reading us very well on what was happening, so they got us to switch to the backup telemetry system. The ground then got a look at us and they could see that a bunch of things had fallen off the line, but there weren’t any shorts or anything bad on the systems so we elected to do nothing until we got through staging. When we got through staging then we went about putting things back on line.”

Down among the consoles in the Mission Control Center the steady flow of glowing figures from the spacecraft filing past on the screens were suddenly replaced by a meaningless jumble of characters. All the telemetry signals had dropped out!

John Aaron was the EECOM, the Flight Controller in charge of the Command and Service Module electrical system, and he recalled, “You must remember we did not have a live television view of the launch. I was just looking at control screens which only had data and curves on them. The first thing I realised was we had a major electrical anomaly. But I did recognise a pattern. When we trained for this condition with our simulators it would always read zeros. It so happened that a year before I was monitoring an entry sequence test from the Kennedy Space Center, and the technicians inadvertently got the whole spacecraft being powered by only one battery. I remembered the random pattern that generated on the telemetry system, and for some reason just filed it off to the back of my mind. I did go in the office the next day to reconstruct what happened and found this obscure SCE [Signal Condition Equipment] switch. Few people knew it was there, or what it was for. It was lucky I was the EECOM monitoring the test that night and when it turned out that we had the problem, I happened to be the EECOM on the console. I don’t think any other EECOM would have recognised that random pattern. Our simulators did not train us for it, but I saw it through the procedural screwup. Although the test happened a year before, that pattern was etched in my mind, and I am talking about a pattern of thirty or forty parameters. Instead of reading zeros, one would read six point something, another read eight point something, which were nonsense numbers for a 28 volt power system.”

Aaron quickly called Capcom Jerry Carr on the voice loop to tell the spacecraft, “Flight, try SCE to Aux.” In the spacecraft Bean heard Carr’s instruction, found the Signal Condition Equipment switch, reached across to flip it down to “Auxiliary” which selected an alternate power supply, and order was restored to the television screens.

Aaron recounts, “We now got back live telemetry that was representative of the actual readouts on the spacecraft. We then realised that the fuel cells, the main power source, had been kicked off the line, all three of them, and the whole spacecraft was now being powered by the emergency re‑entry batteries in the Command Module, which worked on a lower voltage. They were never designed to carry the full load of the Command and Service Module in a launch configuration. The next call I made was to reset the fuel cells and the voltage was returned to normal.

“I felt quite relieved just to get those guys into low Earth orbit, but I will never forget what Chris Kraft said to me that day, he said, ‘Young man, don’t feel like we have to go to the Moon today, but on the other hand if you and the other systems people here can quickly check this vehicle out and you feel comfortable with how to do that then we’re okay to go, but don’t feel you have to be pressured to go to the Moon today after what happened. We don’t have to go to the Moon today.’

“We then dreamed up a way to do a full vehicle system checkout by improvising and cutting and pasting some of the crew procedures that they already had.”

Nothing serious seemed to have happened, so while still hurtling ever faster up into space, the crew had restored all the systems except the inertial guidance system, and that was set by the 32 minute mark as they shot into the darkness over Africa.

There was some concern that the lightning may have damaged the parachute system in the nose of the Command Module or affected some of the Lunar Module systems at launch, particularly the highly sensitive diodes of the landing radar. With all systems apparently working normally Intrepid homed in to a pinpoint landing on the target, Snowman Crater and the Surveyor III spacecraft, 2,029 kilometres west of the Apollo 11 landing site.

As a panorama of the landing area spread in the window before him, all Conrad could see was a jumbled mass of similar shadows and craters. How could they possibly pick out a particular crater in the time available? Remembering the trouble the experts had locating the Apollo 11 landing point, Conrad felt apprehensive about finding a speck, the Surveyor spacecraft and its particular crater, buried among these thousands of lookalikes.

However their navigation was so accurate the automatic controls were taking them straight to the target area. When Conrad lined up the figures from the computer in the window he recognised the familiar shape of Snowman Crater coming into view. After taking over Program 66 manual control at 122 metres Conrad found he had to sidestep the Surveyor crater. “Hey, there it is. Son of a gun, right down the middle of the road. Hey, it started right for the centre of the crater. Look out there. I can’t believe it… amazing, fantastic,” an incredulous Conrad remembered how he had asked trajectory specialist Dave Reed to target Intrepid for the middle of the crater, not really believing he could do it.

Apollo 12 used a new computer program called a Lear Processor to minimise navigational errors using the three big tracking stations on Earth to correct Intrepid’s course, or it would have overshot the target by 1,277 metres.

Conrad told Bean, “I gotta get over to my right,” and searched for a clear area just beyond Snowman Crater until at about 30 metres the rocket exhaust kicked up a raging dust storm and Conrad lost sight of the lurain under the shooting bright streaks of dust blasting away from under their feet. Eyes glued to the instrument panel, occasionally flicking to look out the window, he had no idea whether there were threatening craters or boulders below, or not. The blue light lit up; Bean announced, “Contact light,” and Conrad shut down the rocket motor. They dropped vertically to land with a solid thump about 6metres from the edge of the Surveyor crater at 12:54 am on 19 November.

Conrad: “I think I did something I said I’d never do. I believe I shut that beauty off in the air before touchdown.”

Capcom Jerry Carr in Houston: “Shame on you!”

Conrad: “Well, I was on the gauges. That’s the only way I could see where I was going. I saw that blue contact light and I shut that baby down and we just hit from about 6feet [1.8 m].”

Carr: “Roger. Break, Pete. The Air Force guys say that’s a typical Navy landing!”

Conrad: “It’s a good thing we levelled off high and came down because I sure couldn’t see what was underneath us once I got into that dust.”

Gordon, orbiting in Yankee Clipper 96kilometres above, searched through a 28 power telescope and spotted a speck of light with a shadow, then another speck nearby, about three hours after they landed. He said excitedly, “I have… I have Intrepid! I have Intrepid! The Intrepid is just on the left shoulder of Snowman… I see the Surveyor! I see the Surveyor!”

“I can’t wait to get outside – these rocks have been waiting four and a half billion years for us to come and grab them!” called an impatient Conrad as they worked their way through the essential housekeeping procedures. Five‑and‑a‑half hours later Conrad emerged through the hatch and leapt onto the Lunar Module’s footpad with both feet. “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a long one for me!” he chuckled as he began to look around. Nobody remembers second, so his first words were said voluntarily to win a bet with an Italian journalist and to prove that Armstrong had not been pressured what to say by government officials. Then, “You’ll never believe it. Guess what I see sitting on the side of the crater – the old Surveyor.” The high spirited, exuberant Apollo 12 lunar excursions were a welcome contrast to the formal, tension filled, Apollo 11 lunar walk.

They had landed a mere 183 metres from Surveyor III, launched from Earth 31 months before. Their visit to it would have to wait for the next day, though, as the first task was to lay out all the equipment for the science experiments, the first ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package).

Conrad recalled: “And the dust! Dust got into everything. You walked in a pair of little dust clouds kicked up around your feet. We were concerned about getting dust into the working parts of our spacesuits and the Lunar Module, so we elected to remain in our suits between our two EVA’s.”

Bean to Conrad: “Boy, you sure lean forward.”

Conrad to Bean: “Don’t think you’re gonna steam around here quite as fast as you thought you were.” Bean found running on the moon was quite a new experience. He says, “When I pushed off with my toes I thought I was taking long strides, but when I checked my footprints I found it was an illusion – they were about the same distance apart as they would be on Earth. I seemed to be floating along just above the surface. Although I could jump high, I couldn’t run very fast because there wasn’t the friction with the ground in the lighter gravity.”

Conrad was going through the same experience, “You know what I feel like, Al?”

“What?”

“Did you ever see those pictures of giraffes running in slow motion?”

Bean grinned, “That’s about right.”

“That’s exactly what I feel like.”

They were jerked back into reality with a voice from faraway Texas in their earphones, “Say, would you giraffes give us some comment on your boot penetration as you move across there.”

What would happen to an astronaut if he fell down on the Moon in his suit? This was one of the concerns of the mission planners, but Conrad and Bean found it was actually fun. Conrad was the first astronaut to be able to answer that question in the first astronaut news conference from space: “I was trying to pick up something and I was just standing there next to Al. It was a rock that was just too big to go into the tongs. We had a sort of game we played there of leaning on tongs and sort of doing a one arm jabber‑doo [a Conrad one‑arm push up] all stretched out… I just sort of rolled over on my side down there on the ground and Al, before I got all the way down, just gave me a shove back up again. I don’t think it will be any problem, the business of falling against a rock and cutting your space suit. You don’t fall that fast. You wouldn’t hit a rock hard enough.”

Bean backed him up: “When you start, you fall so slowly that it gives you plenty of time almost to turn around or catch your footing before you get low enough down before it’s too late. I can recall a number of times when I lost my balance. If I had lost my balance that much on Earth, I would probably have fallen down. Now on the Moon, since you start moving so slowly, you’re usually able to spin around, bend your knees and recover.”

One of the big disappointments of the mission was the television camera breaking down after only 20 minutes. As Bean placed it in another spot, Nevil Eyre, video technician at Honeysuckle Creek, was watching his screen. “I could see that Alan Bean was starting to point the TV camera at the Sun, because it was getting very bright up in the top left corner of the screen – then I could see it starting to peel away from the left… it was like somebody holding a sheet of paper and putting a match to it – no flames, just burning, rolling back in a boomerang shape – and I wanted to scream at them to point the camera away from the Sun. Even the Capcom in Houston didn’t know what was happening, the message wasn’t getting to Bean. I heard the Capcom say, ‘We’re not seeing any picture, see if you can bump it’, and Bean tapped it with his hammer. I knew that wasn’t going to fix it – I knew exactly what had happened. That was the end of any video pictures from the Moon this mission.”

Lindsay remembered:

“The rest of the lunar activities were followed from the Earth only with sound. To us at the tracking station it was quite strange to only have black screens around, and the normally busy video section helping the telemetry technicians. Luckily the personalities of Conrad, with his infectious chuckles, ‘Dum‑de‑dum dum’s,’ and Bean with his enthusiastic descriptions, entertained us as they whooped, hummed, joked, and rollicked around, already quite at home in this alien new environment.”

Following a thirteen‑hour rest period after the first day’s activities, the two astronauts emerged from the tiny hatch again and noticed that the scene looked less dramatic. Apollo 12 had the lowest Sun angle of 5° of the Apollo missions and while they were resting the shadows had shortened and the colours had shifted from a gray to a warmer tan‑gray. It now looked much easier to get to the Surveyor spacecraft.

They headed off on foot, skirting around Head Crater and Bench Crater, before turning back at Sharp Crater. They picked up samples until they arrived at the Surveyor, and were surprised to find it a brown colour when they thought it had been white at launch. As they puzzled over where this brown had come from, the soil around being gray, Houston threw in: “Hey, Pete, do you think there is a chance you are at the wrong Surveyor?”

Replied Conrad, “No, sir. Boy, it sure dug in the ground, didn’t it? Oh, look at those pad marks. They’re still there.”

Later Conrad wrote: “The Surveyor was coated with a coating of fine dust, and it looked tan, or even brown, in the lunar light, instead of the glistening white that it was when it left Earth. It was decided later that the dust was kicked up by our descent onto the surface, even though we were 183 metres away.

“We cut samples of the aluminium tubing, which seemed more brittle than the same material on Earth, and some electrical cables. Their insulation seemed to have gotten dry, hard, and brittle. We managed to break off a piece of glass, and we unbolted the TV camera. Then Al suggested we cut off and take back the sampling scoop, and so we added that to the collection.”

Back at the Lunar Module, while waiting for Bean to hoist the samples up, Conrad said, “I feel just like a guy at a shopping centre with the groceries, waiting for his wife.”

After stowing their rock collections they attempted to clean up the clinging lunar dust. “Man, are we filthy. We need a whisk broom,” complained Conrad, frustrated with the impossible task of cleaning up the mess.

At 8:25 am on 20 November the ascent stage of the Lunar Module blasted off for the second copybook launch from the Moon’s surface. As they were shooting up to enter orbit Conrad offered his friend Bean the controls of the Lunar Module.

Bean recalls, “Pete said to me, ‘You’re working too hard, go ahead and look out the window,’ so I looked out the window, and then he said ‘Would you like to fly the LM?’ and I said, ‘Well, yeah I’d love to.’

“I grabbed the controls [Bean had a set the same as Conrad] but before I moved them I said, ‘We don’t want to get off course.’ We had a program that measured velocity in every direction, so Pete said, ‘Let’s call up that program?’ Well, of course it read zero because that’s where it starts. Then I knew if I flew two feet per second left that it would measure it, then after I had finished flying around for a few minutes then I could thrust all those readings back to zero, and we would be right back on course again. I started to fly the LM then I said, ‘The people in Mission Control aren’t going to like this’ – they would notice the thrusters were firing, and they would be wondering why they were firing, and they could also tell it was my hand controller. They might think there was a failure. Pete said, ‘Well, we’re over on the backside of the Moon, they won’t know a thing about it.’ Of course they would know, because everything is recorded on the tape recorder. I’m sure they discovered it later, but it didn’t make any difference. After talking to other people, as far as I know I was the only LM pilot that got to fly the LM. That just shows how special Pete was.”

Bean will always be grateful to Conrad for his thoughtfulness.

Intrepid went on to meet Yankee Clipper with a now very happy Gordon waiting to welcome his mates. When Gordon opened the hatch and saw the two dirty‑looking moonwalkers covered in clouds of lunar dust about to invade his spacecraft, he slammed the hatch with, “You guys ain’t gonna mess up my nice clean spacecraft?” Conrad and Bean had to undress and clean up before being allowed to enter the Yankee Clipper, naked.

After being jettisoned, this was the first time the Lunar Module was driven into the lunar surface to exercise the ALSEP seismometers. Smashing itself to smithereens at 6,012 kilometres per hour, about 72 kilometres from the Apollo 12 ALSEP seismometer, the geophysicists stared at their readouts in growing astonishment as the shock waves built up to a peak at 8 minutes, and died away over a period of 55 minutes. On Earth the same impact would have lasted about two minutes. Dr Maurice Ewing of Columbia University’s Lamont Observatory exclaimed, “It was as though one had struck a bell in a church belfry a single blow and its reveberation had continued for 55 minutes.” This strange phenomenon was repeated with every heavy impact in subsequent missions on all the seismometers.

On the return journey the Apollo 12 astronauts were witness to the first eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. The three astronauts watched a thin sliver of Sun behind the dark mass of the moonlit Earth, and took the first photographs of the Earth’s atmosphere backed by the Sun. The dark side of the Earth was laced with lightning flashes along the equator and the specular light of the full Moon behind them gleamed off the black oceans. Alan Bean decided it was the most spectacular view of the whole flight.

At 2:58 pm Houston time Apollo 12 landed in a rough Pacific Ocean on 24 November, 7.2 kilometres from the carrier USS Hornet . Bean was standing by to quickly punch two circuit breakers to cast off the parachutes before they were pulled over upside down. The Command Module hit the sea with such a jolt Bean felt momentarily dizzy, although he heard Gordon call out, “Hey Al, hit the breakers,” as they began to turn over.

Gordon queried, “Al, what happened?”

“Nothing happened, what are you talking about?”

“You’re bleeding?” Conrad was looking at a gash above Bean’s eye where the 16mm movie camera had broken loose and struck Bean.

A surprised Bean told his companions, “It must have knocked me out for a few seconds, and I didn’t even know it?”

After a welcome on the Hornet , Bean required two stitches in the sick bay before the astronauts were taken to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory for their eleven days, and the second mission to the Moon’s surface was safely over. Apollo 12 had proved the navigation systems were accurate enough to land on the chosen spot, the hardware systems, including the ALSEP, were good enough to support the requirements of the mission, and the astronauts were able to do useful work in a lunar environment.