美国国家公共电台 NPR Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Astronaut Who Walked On The Moon, Dies At 86

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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

One of the astronauts who walked on the moon has died. Alan Bean was on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing in 1969. He flew in space one more time after that, but it was what he did post-NASA that really left a mark. He died yesterday in Houston. He was 86 years old. NPR's Russell Lewis has this remembrance.

RUSSELL LEWIS, BYLINE¹: As the lunar module² pilot on Apollo 12, it was Alan Bean's job to help commander Pete Conrad as he approached the moon, monitoring systems and calling out the descent rate.

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ALAN BEAN: Ninety-six feet coming down 6, slow down the descent rate. Eighty feet coming down at four - you're looking good.

LEWIS: Just a few minutes after they landed, Bean and Conrad were struck by the view out the window.

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BEAN: Holy crud, it's beautiful out here!

PETE CONRAD: It sure is. It's something else.

LEWIS: Bean spent 31 hours on the moon. He and Conrad collected lunar samples and deployed³ several experiments. They were busy almost the whole time, but as Bean recalled during a 2016 NPR interview, he also had a few moments to take it all in.

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BEAN: And as I ran along, I remember looking up and saying to myself, you know, this - this is really the moon. We're really here. It was amazing to us, too. That's the Earth up there. And I said it two or three times to myself.

LEWIS: After Apollo, Bean commanded the second Skylab mission in 1973, orbiting the Earth 59 days. Later, he was in line to fly the first shuttle flights, but he had a change of heart.

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BEAN: So the more I thought about it, the more I realized there were young men and women at NASA in the astronaut office that could fly the shuttle as good as I could or better, but I was the only one interested in trying to do this other job.

LEWIS: That other job - it was to paint. So he left NASA. He'd had an engineering background and was a test pilot in the Navy, but he'd also taken art lessons at night. It was something he always wanted to do full time. For more than four decades after his space career, he chronicled the six missions that landed on the moon.

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BEAN: I feel blessed. Every day when I'm working on these paintings, I think, boy, am I lucky to be the first artist to ever go to another world and try to tell stories that people care about.

LEWIS: In painstaking⁴ detail, he recreated what it was like to be on the moon. His paintings included moon dust and ground-up remnants of Apollo spacecraft and were textured⁵ using tools from his lunar trip. But for all Bean brought back from the moon, he left something behind - his silver astronaut lapel pin, which he had thrown into a crater⁶ as far as he could.

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BEAN: This - what I think about often - when I look at the moon at night, I look up and think about that pin up there, just as shiny as it ever was. And someday maybe somebody will go pick it up.

LEWIS: Mementos⁷ were important to Alan Bean. He believed one day, humans might colonize⁸ the moon, and he hoped they'd display one of his paintings. He wanted future explorers to use it as inspiration to never stop moving outward. Russell Lewis, NPR News.