The astronaut who came fourth

Alan Bean has always been the astronaut no one remembers, said James M. Clash in Bloomberg.com. That’s what happens when you’re the fourth man on the moon. Bean, 79, was part of Apollo 12, the second manned lunar landing; like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of the previous mission, and his own mission mate, Pete Conrad, Bean walked on the moon. But when his boots hit the surface, it was no longer historic. “I didn’t have any first words,” says Bean. “I didn’t think anything philosophical. It was all business.”

He admits to some envy of his predecessors, especially Armstrong. When he watched Armstrong struggling to find a landing site during Apollo 11, Bean says, he felt a twinge of schadenfreude. “Let’s say you’re the backup quarterback in the Super Bowl, and the game is on the line—and the quarterback’s limping. You’re thinking, ‘He’s a better quarterback and we want to win the game, but, at the same time, maybe I ought to get in there—I can win the game.’”

Since retiring from NASA in 1981, he’s been painting and selling space scenes, mixing moon dust from his spacesuit into the paint. He knows his paintings would be worth a lot more if he hadn’t been fourth. “Everybody wishes they were the first man on the moon,” he says.

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