How Astronaut Alan Bean Brought the Moon to Earth

Bean, a 1949 graduate of Paschal High School, walked on the moon and lived to paint the tale.

by

Only a star-sailor could have walked upon the moon. Only an artist with moonwalking credentials could paint the moon as observed at close range. Fort Worth’s Alan Bean had the bases covered when he became the only artist to have portrayed the moon from observation firsthand.

Nor would Bean hesitate to say as much: “I’m the only one who can paint the moon because I’m the only [artist] who knows whether that’s right or not.” Or so he declared upon resigning from NASA in order to honor an overriding imperative to make art.

It was that artistic nature in the first place that had driven Bean (1932-2018) to seek a career beyond the skies. Formal artistic training in 1960 at St. Mary’s College of Maryland had coincided with a hitch in Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland — the beginning of an astronautical career that would lead to his becoming the fourth person to walk on the moon.

Selected to become an astronaut by NASA in 1963 as part of Astronaut Group 3, Bean made his first flight into space aboard Apollo 12, the second crewed mission to land on the moon, at age 37 in November 1969. He made his second and final flight into space on the Skylab 3 mission in 1973, the second crewed mission to the Skylab space station.

As a schoolboy in post-WWII Texas, a 1949 graduate of Fort Worth’s R.L. Paschal High School, Bean was of an ideal age to revel in the moon-exploration mania that gripped the popular culture. No documentation exists of Bean’s interests in entertainment, but safe to call it near-impossible that an imaginative youth of the period could have ignored the most bombastic new motion picture of 1950, Hollywood producer George Pal’s science-fiction epic “Destination Moon.” The attraction was a methodical depiction — speculative but grounded in gravity-defiant realism — of a mission that seemed ever-likelier to take place in real time and real space.

Nor could Bean at 24, as a newly commissioned Naval Ensign from the University of Texas, scarcely have missed Mike Todd’s epic of 1956, “Around the World in 80 Days.” That picture contains a fantastical short film from 1902, Georges Mèliés’ “A Voyage to the Moon,” with its crowd-pleasing money-shot of a rocket ship’s striking a literalized Man in the Moon smack-dab in one eye.

Speculation? Of course. The fascinating, enigmatic merger of art and science that shaped Alan Bean’s career practically dictates such a response: Something, some alchemy of imagination and ambition, can only have triggered the impulse to visit distant space and bring back practical impressions. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote 3 1/2 centuries ago, “What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed [while in hiding], though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.” Alan Bean, a myth-caliber hero of the Cold War’s headlong surge into unknown territory, invites no less a flight of conjecture.

Bean, a native of Wheeler in Texas’ Panhandle region, considered Fort Worth his hometown. His father, Arnold Horace Bean, of the Soil Conservation Service, had settled here for the long term after a round of job assignments in Louisiana. Following high school graduation, Alan Bean enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He completed a degree in aeronautical engineering at UT–Austin in 1955.

Following training as a Naval test pilot and aviation-safety preparation at the University of Southern California, Bean was assigned to Navy Attack Squadron VA-172 at Cecil Field, Florida, flying the A-4 Skyhawks, during which time (1963) he was selected as a NASA astronaut. Bean had logged more than 7,145 hours of flying time, including 4,890 hours in jet aircraft.

He was selected as a backup command pilot for Gemini 10, but he was unsuccessful in securing an early Apollo flight assignment. He was placed in Apollo Applications in the interim, becoming the first astronaut to dive in the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator. When a fellow astronaut, Clifton Williams, was killed in an air crash, a place opened for Bean on the backup crew of Apollo 9. Apollo 12 Commander Conrad, who had instructed Bean at the Naval Test Pilot School years before, specified Bean as Williams’ successor.

Bean was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing. In November 1969, Bean and Pete Conrad landed on the moon’s Ocean of Storms — after a flight of 250,000 miles and a launch that overcame a lightning strike. Bean executed the order to restore telemetry after the spacecraft was struck by lightning 36 seconds past its launching — salvaging the mission. They explored the lunar surface, deployed surface experiments, and installed the first nuclear-power generator on the moon. (Dick Gordon remained in lunar orbit, photographing landing sites for long-term reference.)

Bean’s paintings could only prove autobiographical, as chronicles of the moonwalking adventure. His misadventure of misplacing a camera-timer (preventing a photograph of himself and Pete Conrad) was chronicled in an after-the-fact painting, imagining the scene that he had hoped to shoot in real time.

Bean followed through as spacecraft commander of Skylab 3, during July-September of 1973, logging 24.4 million miles. During the mission, Bean tested a prototype of the Manned Maneuvering Unit and performed one spacewalk outside Skylab. On his next assignment, Bean was the backup spacecraft commander of the U.S. flight crew for the American-Russian Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. He retired in 1975 a Naval Captain but continued as civilian head of Astronaut Candidate Operations.

Bean resigned from NASA in 1981 to devote time to painting. He explained this development in terms of expressing his experiences in pictorial, documentary terms: “I had to figure out a way to add color to the moon without ruining it... If I were a scientist painting the moon, I would paint it gray. I’m an artist, so I can add colors to the moon.” To affirm the impression, he applied samples of moon dust — salvaged from the fabric of his spacesuit — to the paints.

The proverbial Last Man Standing among the Apollo 12 crew, Alan Bean died at 86 in 2018 in Houston.