Pat Trammell

36 seconds after liftoff, lightning hit the U.S. moon rocket Apollo 12 and knocked out the spacecraft's power, with President Nixon at the launch site. One flight controller in Houston, raised on an Oklahoma farm, had seen that exact failure once before, and he fixed it with a single sentence. It was 11:22 a.m. on November 14, 1969, at Kennedy Space Center, under solid overcast and rain. Nixon was the first sitting president to attend a crewed launch. At 36.5 seconds the Saturn V set off a lightning bolt on its own as it climbed. All 3 fuel cells dropped offline, and the spacecraft fell back on batteries that could not carry the load. At 52 seconds a second bolt struck. The "8-ball" that shows the crew which way the ship is pointing went out. In Mission Control the numbers on the screens turned to garbage. Nobody on the ground could tell what still worked on a rocket that was still climbing. John Aaron sat at the EECOM console, in charge of the spacecraft's electrical system. About a year earlier he had watched a test at Kennedy throw up the same strange readings, and he had traced them to a box called the Signal Conditioning Equipment. He keyed his mike: "Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux." Flight director Gerry Griffin did not know the switch. Neither did Gerald Carr, the astronaut on the radio, who passed it up anyway. Commander Pete Conrad heard "FCE" and asked what the hell that was. Alan Bean, in the right seat, knew. He threw the switch, the data came back clean, and then he brought the fuel cells back online. One danger remained. Engineers feared the lightning had damaged the explosive bolts that open the parachute compartment. Mission Control reasoned that if the parachutes were dead, an abort would kill the crew just the same. So it sent them on to the moon and kept the worry to itself. Aaron said Conrad laughed all the way into orbit. 5 days later Conrad set the lunar module down on the Ocean of Storms, about 535 feet from Surveyor 3, a robot probe that had been sitting there since 1967. And when Apollo 12 came home, the parachutes opened.