Alan Bean

The fourth man to walk on the moon, alongside the third man Pete Conrad, Alan Bean first went into aboard Apollo 12 and was the lunar module pilot.

Alan Bean on the surface of the Moon during Apollo 12 in 1969. Fellow Moonwalker Pete Conrad is reflected in Bean’s helmet as he takes the photo.

However, he worked at NASA for years sitting on his flight experience and bragging about his intelligence without a flight assignment.

“Pete [Conrad], who knew me from test pilot school [chose me] although I hadn’t done anything during the period of NASA where he could say, ‘He is really good. He just is undiscovered.’ I wasn’t the undiscovered talent. It was never that. … So he, for some reason, still felt that I could be a good lunar module pilot.”

They gathered up rocks from the Ocean of Storms and clipped a sample off the nearby, unmanned, Surveyor spacecraft that had been sitting on the surface.

Astronaut Pete Conrad jiggles the Surveyor 3 craft. Human scale demonstrates typical lander height of 3 meters. Lunar module is about 200 meters away, in the background. (NASA)

See 3 and 12 for the 1969 Apollo 12 flight landing near Surveyor 3. Photo from wikipedia

He continued to work for NASA until 1981 when he retired.

To paint.

Some of his works are on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

What makes his work not only awesome but also so cool?

“NASA has a strict policy that everything that belongs to NASA stays with NASA, although all of the astronauts have been able to keep a few mementos from their work,” he says.

Bean managed to keep his patches from his Moon-worn space suit, his boots, and a single glove.

He mixed moon dust into the paint, put bits of his real NASA patches into the paintings, AND he used his real spacesuit boot to stamp a pattern into the glossy finish.

“In some of my paintings, I put one of my space boots on and walk across the surface. It creates a nice effect that a lot of people enjoy, and I enjoy doing it.”

“I believe that 100, 200, 300 years from now all these paintings will be around, because they’re the first paintings of humans doing things off this Earth,” Bean said. “When humans go to Mars they’re going to do the very same things, because this is what humans do.” –Space.com

We hope someone is around to paint Mars!

While we won’t be able to purchase ANY of his available paintings for a very VERY long time we encourage him to keep doing what he loves. The world needs good art.

More on his Neil Armstrong works.

Many of the subjects are not true to life, but are part of Bean’s imagination. There is a whimsical touch to his works that certainly makes this viewer smile.