Alan Bean

Alan Bean grew up in Wheeler, Texas, and took an aeronautical engineering degree at the University of Texas at Austin on a Navy scholarship, then spent four years as a fighter pilot flying Cougars and Skyhawks off carriers before applying to test pilot school at Patuxent River in 1960. His instructor there was Pete Conrad, a brash, funny fellow pilot who would later pick him for a mission. Bean was passed over for NASA's second astronaut class in 1962 and made the cut on his second try in 1963, joining the third group. He married Sue Ragsdale in 1955, and for years afterward the two of them lived the Navy-then-NASA schedule of a man who was gone more than he was home.

Conrad picked Bean as his lunar module pilot for Apollo 12, and thirty-six seconds after launch on November 14, 1969, lightning struck the rocket twice, knocking out telemetry; Bean, remembering an obscure switch from simulator training, called out "SCE to Aux" and restored it. The crew landed in the Ocean of Storms on November 19, and Bean and Conrad spent more than seven hours across two moonwalks, making him the fourth human being to stand on the Moon. He commanded Skylab 3 in 1973, fifty-nine days in orbit covering 24.4 million miles, and retired from NASA in 1981 and from the Navy, as a captain, in 1975, after more than seven thousand flying hours.

For all the hours Bean spent on the lunar surface, almost no photographs of him exist there, because the crew's one camera was normally pointed by whoever was standing at it, and that was usually Bean pointing it at Conrad. The self-timer portrait the two of them planned of themselves together never got taken. Bean's first marriage, to Sue Ragsdale, ended in divorce in 1976, the strain of a career built on being away from home outlasting the marriage itself. He spent the rest of his life trying to put back onto canvas an experience that had barely been recorded in pictures at the time it happened, mixing actual lunar dust into his paint and pressing a real moon boot into some of the canvases to leave its print.

Bean called himself the only artist alive who could paint the Moon accurately, because he was the only one who had been there and could judge whether the light and the color were right. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum opened a retrospective of his paintings in July 2009. He fell suddenly ill while traveling in Indiana in May 2018 and died two weeks later, on May 26, in Houston, the last surviving member of the Apollo 12 crew. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Alan Bean's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Apollo 12 mission
  Lunar module pilot; fourth person to walk on the Moon 1969
• Skylab 3 mission
  Commander; 59 days in orbit, 24.4 million miles traveled 1973
• "Alan Bean: Painting Apollo" artwork
  Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum retrospective, opened July 2009 2009

• March 15, 1932 aged 0 Born in Wheeler, Texas
• 1955 aged ~23 Graduates University of Texas at Austin and is commissioned a Navy ensign
• November 1960 aged 28 Graduates U.S. Naval Test Pilot School under instructor Pete Conrad
• October 1963 aged 31 Selected into NASA's third astronaut group
• November 14, 1969 aged 37 Launches on Apollo 12; lightning strikes the rocket twice Bean's call of "SCE to Aux" restored telemetry.
• November 19, 1969 aged 37 Walks on the Moon in the Ocean of Storms Fourth human being to do so, across two moonwalks totaling more than seven hours.
• July 29, 1973 aged 41 Launches as commander of Skylab 3 Fifty-nine days in orbit, concluding September 25, 1973.
• June 1981 aged 49 Retires from NASA
• May 26, 2018 aged 86 Dies in Houston after a sudden illness The last surviving member of the Apollo 12 crew.

• Pete Conrad 1930–1999
  Apollo 12 commander and third person to walk on the Moon, known for his humor and skill. commanded by, on Apollo 12
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. contemporary of
• Eugene Cernan 1934–2017
  Commander of Apollo 17 and the last person to walk on the Moon. contemporary of
• Norman Rockwell 1894–1978
  Illustrator whose idealized depictions of American life graced magazine covers for nearly 50 years. successor in American representational art