Pete Conrad

Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. was born June 2, 1930, in Philadelphia, to a family that lost its money in the Depression before he was old enough to remember having it. Undiagnosed dyslexia nearly got him expelled from prep school until a teacher recognized the problem and taught him to compensate; he went on to earn an aeronautical engineering degree from Princeton in 1953, becoming the first astronaut to come out of the Ivy League. He flew Navy fighters, then graduated from the Navy's test pilot school in 1958, developing a reputation for a grin that rarely quit and a tolerance for risk that unnerved some instructors. NASA rejected his first astronaut application in 1959 over a medical technicality; he reapplied and was accepted into the third astronaut class in 1962.

Conrad commanded Gemini 11 in September 1966, reaching what was then the highest altitude a crewed spacecraft had flown, and on November 14, 1969, commanded Apollo 12, which launched into a Florida rainstorm and was struck by lightning twice in its first minute, briefly knocking out its instruments before the crew restored them by hand. He became the third person to walk on the Moon on November 19, having bet reporters beforehand that his first words would prove he was shorter than Neil Armstrong, and delivered a joke about a small step for him being a long one. He and Alan Bean parked their lander within walking distance of the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe, a precision landing NASA had not achieved before. He later commanded the first crewed Skylab mission in 1973, repairing launch damage that nearly doomed the station.

Conrad retired from NASA and the Navy in the mid-1970s for a corporate career at McDonnell Douglas, trading the fame of the Moon for two more decades in commercial and military aviation work that drew far less attention than three fewer minutes on the lunar surface had. His son Christopher died of lymphoma in April 1990, at twenty-nine. In 1996, at sixty-five, Conrad set a round-the-world speed record in a Learjet, still chasing the kind of risk that had defined his Navy career three decades after the Moon. He divorced his first wife, Jane, in 1988 after thirty-five years and four sons, then remarried; the marriage that survived Gemini, Apollo and Skylab did not survive the years that came after them.

Conrad died July 8, 1999, at 69, of internal injuries from a motorcycle accident near Ojai, California, after a fall that seemed minor at first and turned fatal within hours; he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Among the twelve men who walked on the Moon, Conrad is remembered less for records than for temperament: astronauts and historians alike describe him as the one who treated the most dangerous flying in human history as something to laugh through, a contrast that has kept his Apollo 12 crew's jokes and outtakes circulating decades after missions with fewer near-disasters were forgotten.

Pete Conrad's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gemini 11 mission
  Set the altitude record for a crewed spacecraft 1966
• Apollo 12 mission
  Third crewed Moon landing; Conrad became the third person to walk on the lunar surface 1969
• Skylab 2 mission
  Commanded the repair mission that saved America's first space station 1973
• Round-the-world Learjet speed record other
  Set at age 65: 49 hours, 26 minutes, 8 seconds 1996

• June 2, 1930 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• 1953 aged ~23 Graduates Princeton with a degree in aeronautical engineering
• 1962 aged ~32 Selected into NASA's third astronaut class
• August 21, 1965 aged 35 Flies Gemini 5, setting an eight-day endurance record
• September 12, 1966 aged 36 Commands Gemini 11, reaching a record crewed-flight altitude
• November 19, 1969 aged 39 Becomes the third person to walk on the Moon Apollo 12's launch had been struck by lightning twice five days earlier.
• 1973 aged ~43 Commands Skylab 2, repairing critical launch damage
• April 1990 aged 59 His son Christopher dies of lymphoma at 29
• July 8, 1999 aged 69 Dies from injuries in a motorcycle accident near Ojai, California

• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. flew rockets built by
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. fulfilled the promise of
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. served during the administration of
• Alan Bean 1932–2018
  Apollo 12 lunar module pilot and fourth person to walk on the Moon, later a celebrated space artist. Apollo 12 crewmate