With the eyes of the world pinned on the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion capsule that will soon take off for their first trip to the Moon, it’s easy to forget that we’ve visited the satellite before, in the years before our generation came to be. And for all intents and purposes, it was a much more difficult job for the people living back then.
Lacking pretty much all the technology we today take for granted, America managed to fly several successful missions to the Moon. Some of them went without a hitch, like Apollo 11, while others nearly ended in disaster, like Apollo 13.
The tale of Apollo 12 is perhaps stranger than most - the mission went down in history as the second to land on the Moon, but before it got to do that, it had to survive nature’s wrath in ways few can comprehend.
You know how they say lightning never strikes in one place twice? Well, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that’s nothing but a myth, and lightning “can, and often does, strike the same place repeatedly — especially if it’s a tall and isolated object.”
And back in 1969, as Apollo 12 soared to the sky, few things were as high and isolated as the Saturn V in the clouded skies over Florida. So the rocket, carrying Charles Conrad Jr., Richard Gordon Jr., and Alan L. Bean, got hit by lightning not once, but two times during the ascent.
The strikes were quite severe, with the first one (36.5 seconds into the flight) knocking off electric power generation and distribution systems, and the second (52 seconds in) rendering the inertial guidance system, which provided crucial info on acceleration and attitude changes, useless.
Just like it happened in the case of Apollo 13, the crew kept its cool, managed to overcome all the issues, and kept going to the Moon, where they landed safely.
For most of those on the ground, the trials and tribulations of Apollo 12 remain mysteries hiding behind a thick blanket of clouds. For a long time, so did the chatter between the astronauts and mission control.
Now, thanks to the guys over at Hazegrayart, we get a more visual impression of how the events unfolded, with a computer-generated Saturn V climbing through the hostile skies and getting hit, and the audio recordings matched to the images.
You can enjoy the entire experience in the video below.
Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies. Full profile
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