On November 14, 1969, just four months after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, NASA tried it again. Apollo 12 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in pouring rain, into a sky thick with clouds. Thirty-six seconds after launch, lightning struck the rocket. Half the spacecraft's instruments went haywire. A young flight controller named John Aaron remembered an obscure switch from a training session and radioed up: 'SCE to AUX.' Astronaut Alan Bean flipped it. The instruments came back online. Apollo 12 climbed safely on into orbit.
Once at the Moon, Pete Conrad and Bean made the second-ever crewed landing, touching down right next to the old Surveyor 3 probe, which had landed there 31 months earlier. They jogged over to it, pulled off pieces to bring home, and bounded around in the lunar dust - all while command module pilot Dick Gordon orbited above.
Apollo 11 gets remembered for being first, but Apollo 12 proved the first landing was no fluke. Conrad, the shortest of all the Moonwalkers at 5 foot 6, joked his way through the trip, including his first words on stepping off the ladder: 'Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me.'
