Mourning an Astronaut’s Astronaut

Of the 12 NASA moon walkers, Charles “Pete” Conrad was not the best-known--Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and fellow Orange County resident Buzz Aldrin probably beat Conrad in the household-name sweepstakes.

But the third man to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 12 was remembered Friday as perhaps NASA’s most respected flight commander, a team builder and straight shooter with excellent flying skills and the kind of instinctual knowledge that could--and did--save a mission.

“He was the best guy who ever put on a spacesuit,” said fellow astronaut Alan Bean, who kicked up lunar dust with Conrad on the 1969 Apollo flight.

“I never met a guy who, when all is said and done, had the qualities of leadership, decision-making ability, personality and attitude that Pete did. He could make a life-or-death split-second decision and make it right.”

Conrad, 69, flew four space missions--Gemini 5, Gemini 11, Apollo 12 and Skylab 2. He kept Apollo 12 on a steady ascent despite a frightening lightning strike during launch, and led a spacewalk that spread a thermal parasol over a damaged section of the Skylab workshop that saved the program.

There is a certain irony then that the space trailblazer’s life was claimed by a rather routine accident. He was winding a curve on a windy mountain road near Ojai on his beloved 1996 Harley-Davidson on Thursday morning when he made too wide a turn, drove into a shallow ditch and then up a hillside. His motorcycle flipped and Conrad landed on his side, sustaining grave chest and abdominal injuries that would lead to his death at a local hospital five hours later.

He was not under the influence of alcohol, nor driving at an excessive speed, the California Highway Patrol said Friday. He was traveling only 25 mph when the accident occurred at 11:40 a.m.

When the CHP arrived on the scene, Conrad was talking but complained of minor pain on his right side, near his rib cage.

“There was nothing unusual about the accident,” CHP Officer George Myers Jr. said. “He just unfortunately went off the right side of the road.”

Contrary to earlier reports, Conrad’s wife, Nancy, was not riding with her husband at the time of the accident, Deputy Coroner James Baroni said Friday.

But she was contacted at the couple’s Huntington Beach home immediately after the crash and drove to Ojai to be with her husband. Baroni said she was with Conrad before he died just after 5 p.m.

According to Bean, Nancy Conrad planned to fly to Northern California to meet her husband at the end of the road trip.

Conrad’s spill occurred in one of many bends along a mile-long stretch of California 150 known as the Dennison Grade. The steep, two-lane road winds through dry hills of clay and brush and offers sweeping views of the citrus orchards and mountains of the Ojai Valley. Ojai, coincidentally, is named for the Chumash word for “moon.”

An inveterate thrill seeker, history’s third moon walker raced formula cars and flew jets, in addition to riding Harleys.

“He enjoyed the thrill and the fun that all of those sports provide and, I think, could honestly say he was having a ball until the minutes preceding his death,” said Roger L. Werner, one of 14 men in a group of friends riding with Conrad on an annual motorcycle trip from Los Angeles to Monterey. They were preparing to stop for lunch in Ojai when the crash occurred.

“I think Pete had near-misses nearly dozens of times,” Werner said, “and I think this looked like a near-miss until the very end.”

Conrad moved to Orange County shortly after retiring from the space program in 1973, living in Huntington Beach. Space, though, stayed in his blood and he continued a career that involved research and development in space travel.

In the 1970s, Conrad began a 20-year stint with McDonnell Douglas, first as vice president for space program development in the company’s Astronautics division in Huntington Beach. Later he worked as vice president for marketing of the Douglas Aircraft company and eventually became staff vice president for new business at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems.

After he retired from that company in 1996, he founded Universal Space Lines, a private satellite-tracking and rocketry venture in Newport Beach. He also founded, with fellow Apollo 12 astronaut Richard F. Gordon, Astro Sciences Corp., a Chatsworth company that makes computer networking equipment.

John Grady, chief financial officer of the Newport Beach firm, remembered Conrad as a man who was “100% fun to be around at all times.”

“The nation and the world have lost a great visionary and leader of commercial space development,” he said. “This is a man who looked toward the future.”

Others who knew Conrad in his role as entrepreneur remember an accessible man, not taken with his own celebrity.

Isela Herrera worked at Rocket Development Co. in Los Alamitos and saw Conrad often.

“He was very down-to-earth,” she said. “He was an astronaut, but he didn’t go around and act like one.”

In addition to his business pursuits, Conrad found time for other projects and liked to get children interested in space. He published comic books and his cartoon persona was Commander Pete.

He also participated in local charities. Conrad donated a picture of himself and other astronauts on the moon to the Boys & Girls Club of Buena Park. The photograph, when auctioned off, raised about $8,000 for the group.

Besides Apollo 12 in November 1969, Conrad flew two Gemini missions in the mid-1960s and commanded NASA’s first space station, Skylab, in 1973. He later worked as an executive for McDonnell Douglas (later bought by Boeing) and formed a company aimed at making spaceflight as common as a hop on a plane.

“He embodied the ‘can-do’ spirit of NASA, taking on problems and dealing with them without a lot of fuss,” NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin said. “America has lost one of the great aviators and explorers of the 20th century.”

Six weeks ago, in an interview with the Associated Press in advance of the 30th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, by Apollo 11, Conrad said he couldn’t be happier and was looking forward to old age.

Sen. John Glenn, the former astronaut who made a much ballyhooed return to space earlier this year at age 77, said that he spoke with Conrad three or four weeks ago and that Conrad was considering buying an executive jet and was excited about it.

“I didn’t know anyone that was filled with more irrepressible enthusiasm and sense of humor and new ideas and general joy of life than Pete,” Glenn said. “He’ll be missed very much.”

Born to a mainline Philadelphia family on June 2, 1930, Conrad was described by Tom Wolfe in the acclaimed 1979 book “The Right Stuff” as possessing the charming combination of “party manners and Our Gang scrappiness.”

His father was a World War I balloonist who later started an investment business that pioneered the concept of mutual funds in the 1930s. His father’s success allowed him to grow up with chauffeurs and maids. But that lifestyle was short-lived. His father was an alcoholic, which led to his financial ruin. His parents divorced when he was 11.

His dreams of flight were hatched as a young boy, when he rigged up a big wooden box with wings and pretended to be Charles Lindbergh. “I can remember laying out complete cockpits on the floor of my room. I would look up pictures of Lindbergh’s plane, then scrounge around for things to try to duplicate. I’d use soapboxes, thumbtacks and chairs . . . then sit inside for hours pretending to fly.”

He finally learned to fly when he was 15.

When he was 16, he flunked out of Haverford, a prestigious private boys school in Pennsylvania where he was known as a prankster who hid in drainpipes, tossed eggs at teachers and blew up Bunsen burners in the science lab. He shaped up at the Darrow School, a small boarding school in New York. Then he won a Navy scholarship to Princeton, where he studied aeronautical engineering and met his first wife, Jane DuBose of Texas.

He graduated in 1953 and became a fighter pilot. In 1959, he was given secret orders to try out for Project Mercury, the nation’s attempt to put the first man in space. He was not chosen to be among the first group of U.S. astronauts, which for a time dashed his hopes of becoming one. But in 1962 he was invited by Donald K. Slayton, then the chief astronaut of the original seven, to join the space program.

In 1965, he piloted Gemini 5, an eight-day, 120-orbit mission that laid the groundwork for the moon missions. Conrad and his colleague L. Gordon Cooper Jr. were pronounced in excellent health after extensive physical examinations at the conclusion of the flight. Gemini flight surgeon Dr. Charles Berry said they proved that the United States could safely fly men to the moon. “I have seen nothing to date to lead me to change my views . . . that we have qualified men for the moon,” he said.

On Nov. 14, 1969, Apollo 12 was launched. Conrad was commander of this second lunar landing mission, accompanied by Gordon, the command module pilot, and Bean, the lunar module pilot.

Apollo 12 executed the first precision lunar landing, bringing the Intrepid lunar module to a safe touchdown in the moon’s Ocean of Storms.

But the first moments of the launch were drenched in suspense. Barely a minute into the flight, all of the vehicle’s warning lights began to flash. “Everything in the world has dropped out up here,” Bean recalls Conrad saying. None of them knew what was happening , but Bean feared that the command and service modules had separated. The spacecraft had been struck by lightning, but no one knew that.

At that point, Conrad could have aborted the mission “and no one would have said a negative thing,” Bean said. “They would have said that was a good thing to do. But he didn’t. He had this sixth sense and seat of the pants instincts . . . and we kept going up. In 10 or 20 seconds we broke out of the cloud and we had a pitch rate. So I always felt he saved the mission right there, maybe saved our lives, being to abort can be as dangerous as anything.”

Both Bean and Conrad spent 7 hours and 45 minutes on the lunar surface, performing the first lunar traverse, installing a nuclear power generator station that would provide power source for long-term scientific experiments, gathering geologic samples of lunar surface and completing a close-up inspection of the Surveyor III spacecraft.

“I’m afraid I didn’t find any great religious experience from going to the moon,” Conrad said later. “I know some of the astronauts did. But those guys were religious before they went so it’s not surprising that they got religious when they came back.”

He kept his crew in good spirits with a zany sense of humor. Bean remembered a moment “floating in space on the way to the moon” when Conrad handed out plastic bags and told them to drop their pants. He said he wanted them to “do our business, so we won’t have to do it when we get to the moon” and then he volunteered to go first.