Apollo 12 NASA AS-507 Saturn V Mission Reports & Technical Documents PDF

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." - President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

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The Apollo 12 Command Module is on display at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Apollo 12 Mission

Apollo 12 was the sixth crewed flight in the United States Apollo program and the second to land on the Moon. It was launched on November 14, 1969, from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Lightning struck the Saturn V 36.5 seconds after lift-off, discharging down to the Earth through the ionized exhaust plume. Protective circuits on the fuel cells in the service module (SM) detected overloads and took all three fuel cells offline, along with much of the command and service module (CSM) instrumentation. A second strike at 52 seconds knocked out the “8-ball” attitude indicator. The telemetry stream at Mission Control was garbled. However, the Saturn V continued to fly normally; the strikes had not affected the Saturn V instrument unit guidance system, which functions independently from the CSM.

Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad and Apollo Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean performed just over one day and seven hours of lunar surface activity while Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon remained in lunar orbit.

On November 19, Conrad and Bean achieved a precise landing at their expected location within walking distance of the site of the Surveyor 3 robotic probe, which had landed on April 20, 1967.

The Lunar Module “Intrepid” lifted off from the Moon on November 20 and docked with the Command Module “Yankee Clipper”. The Apollo 12 mission ended on November 24 with a successful splashdown.