To the Moon: Pete Conrad 

I remember Pete. A true blue legend.

Aye. Good old Uncle Pete.

The crew of Apollo 12 were close friends before they joined the space program. I think Conrad and Gordon attended the same (Naval) Test-Pilot School class, and one of them was Al Beans instructor at the same school at a later point.

Scott Manley has a great, in-depth video about the whole apollo 12 SCE to aux situation. He goes over how the electrical system was designed.

Is this the crew with the rover who were go karting, playing golf etc I always found their acting to be slightly over the top.

@@neilarmstrongsson795 No. Alan Shepard (Apollo 14) played the golf shot with a makeshift club. A moon buggy was included on Apollo 15, 16, and 17, but not before.

Don't forget the Skylab repair!

@@robertknight5429 Totally forgot that - watched the launch of Skylab and all of the crews. Thanks

Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay made summiting Everest appear to be quite the achievement. Last year more than 600 people repeated their feat. Among the multitude to reach the summit over the years was Arunima Sinha an Indian woman with one leg. Messrs Armstrong and Aldrin along with the entire team back on Earth were doing it for the first time. Their task was made easier due to the missions before them, all the way back to project Mercury. Indeed without Von Braun and his V2, there would have been no moon landing. Certainly not before 1970. Maybe we should thank the slaves who died building his rocket. And perhaps a nod to those occupants of London who were unfortunate enough to be at the 'hard landing' point of those V2's. As for Bean, his main achievement from the perspective to those of us on Earth excitedly tuning in to watch the second moon walk, was to point the camera at the sun burning it out and depriving us all of our front row view. That was smart.

I definitely agree about the interviewer, although I find it quite ironic that "To the Moon" is ultimately one of my favorite documentary overviews of the early space program. That's probably why so little of this interview ended up in the final product.

And I could do without all the clapperboard business etc. Would be easy to edit out. But good interview nonetheless.

And according to Mike Collins he was ‘good and colourful!’ Should have played Pete Conrad in a Pete Conrad movie.

Pete Conrad was a superb astronaut, there was no one better.

And actually, Max Faget was not a McDonnell engineer but a NASA engineer with STG at Langley. One of the primary engineers at McDonnell involved with Gemini was Jim Chamberlin, a Canadian who had come over to the US after the Avro Arrow project was cancelled

@@ArmstrongSpace Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio is a great visit. Recommended.

@@ArmstrongSpace all well told in Apollo:Race to the Moon. Best book on Apollo without hardly mentioning an astronaut.

Read the sources not the books

@@ArmstrongSpace Thanks for correcting that. And actually, Faget was an engineer with _NACA_ since NASA didn't exist when he and his working group were designing the Man-In_Space-Soonest concept. It's actually a gross oversimplification to say that he or any one man designed the Mercury capsule. The aerodynamics and an ablating heat shield, the molded couch and escape tower are all him but it's not like he sat down and drew every single blueprint to build the thing. There were a number of companies bidding to actually construct the Mercury capsule to the NACA specifications. The main point is, Gus Grissom didn't design it.

They were, Pete and Dick Gordon were particularly close, I think all the way back to their academy days.

@@BoogsMcNoogs Pete went to Princeton and Dick went to the University of Washington. Their friendship with each other and with Al Bean was forged at Pax River.

​@@dskyyksdConrad and Gordon had roomed earlier aboard USS Ranger aircraft carrier from which they flew flight operations.

tbf, the notion of reusing boosters had been around since the 50's, so its not really a new idea

On Apollo 8 Borman had made it clear he'd rather die than use the abort handle

You never saw "The Right Stuff"? Gus to von Braun, regarding changes to the Mercury capsule: "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

How what?

@@Emdee5632 How was anyone able to sit in those things for 14 days? I would've walked out of the thing after 14 hrs. The pain in the knees would've been unbearable for me.

There was only one mission that lasted almost 14 days, Gemini-7 (Borman and Lovell). As Conrad explains they had special suits. It wasn't that cramped, they were able to get out of their suits and get back into them - I guess experiencing microgravity might have helped. So they didn't feel their own weight. However being constantly in more or less the same position must have been uncomfortable... The last couple of days they didn't have much to do and they hated them. Back on Earth Borman and Lovell joked they might have well get married, having been so close to each other all the time. One other mission lasted about 8 days (Gemini-5) the others lasted from less than a day to about 4 days. Lasting longer than even the longest Apollo mission, Gemini-7's record wasn't broken until one of the Soyuz missions in the early 1970s. They went to extremes by attempting to go to 14 days in the Gemini. Apollo 17 lasted for about 12 and a half days, only about half of that was spent going from Earth to the moon and back, the three astronauts sitting or floating around in a roomier Apollo command module. I think 7 or 8 days in a Gemini would have been good enough...

They did a lot more than just collect rocks. Seismometers among other experiments.

Frank Borman just wanted to beat the Soviets, he didn't care about science

But the point (at least on 15, 16 and 17) is WHERE they collected the rocks. #15 discovered the so-called "Genesis" rock.

Weird that no one gets access to see these rocks.

@@neilarmstrongsson795 HUH??? They were shared all over the world. Two hundred and seventy were given to nations of the world and 100 to the 50 US states. But 184 of these are lost, stolen or unaccounted for - 160 around the world and 24 in the US. The rocks were distributed to countries ranging from Afghanistan to Trinidad and Tobago.

Pete died in July of 1999.

This was for the PBS documentary To the Moon, directed by Kirk Wolfinger. He has quite a body of work and is certainly not an amateur.

DrTWG, you make a good point about the inexperienced crew of the third lunar landing. I don't know why you call Alan Shepard "Jose" but my point is, he not only waited years for this chance, he at this time had influence within NASA to command a mission to the moon. Maybe they wanted a Mercury astronaut to go, and maybe he felt comfortable with the other two that went with him. Of course all of the Apollo astronauts and people that worked on the program deserve respect and gratitude. Pete Conrad will always be honored for his skill, intelligence and down right coolness. Thank you for your perspective, it certainly provokes some thought.

I agree with you 100%. Here's the point that needs to be understood. I am 100% positive at liftoff the crew of Apollo 14 was fit to fly that mission, as they did. The problem is according to established rules Alan Shepard was not qualified to command it. It is the bending of those rules that was not right. The "Jose" line relates to Jose Jimenez persona played by comedian Bill Dana. Even Deke Slayton called him Jose.

@@THE-michaelmyers Exactly right . Imho Shepard was a capricious martinet who could make astronaut's lives a misery when he headed up the Astronaut Office . He was also rather derisive about the science on Apollo and the geologists didn't like his attitude . Whereas astronauts like Frank Borman had a strong sense of duty , honour and country , Shepard had a strong sense of Shepard. Slayton set the rules than abandoned them so his pal could get a seat - and of course he wasn't going to settle for anything other than command . Gordo Cooper even wrote that you had to watch your back when Al was around . I don't think he should have been on 14 , let alone command it as an essentially all-rookie crew.

@@DrTWG Shepard if not the worse "hound dog" of the 7 was tied for it with Cooper. It was an open secret that some still talk about here in Hampton Roads where Langley AFB is located. People think it was just at the "cape", NOPE it was everywhere he went. His wife knew about it and just looked the other way. I still think most of the bad karma that beset Shepard (Meniere's disease) followed by 2 VERY serious situations that developed on Apollo 14 that could have stopped the landings was because of these actions. The docking mechanism failed and later what might have been a solder ball shorted out the abort button on the LM. I also had the pleasure of meeting some Naval Aviators who knew him in the 1950s. I can't print their comments about him here. So NO!!!! I am not a fan!

They who?

Idiot

Twelve people have walked on the Moon and dozens of unmanned probes have also landed on the Moon, three in the last year!

Stupid comment ..how do you think we can accurately measure the distance from earth to the moon and who bought back the moon rocks.