Astronaut Charles Conrad Embodied NASA’s ‘Can-Do Spirit’

Of the 12 NASA moonwalkers, Charles “Pete” Conrad was not the best-known--Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and 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 space suit,” said fellow astronaut Alan Bean, who kicked up lunar dust with Conrad on the 1969 Apollo flight. “He could make a life-and-death split-second decision and make it right.”

Conrad 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, saving the program.

There is a certain irony that the space trailblazer’s life was claimed by a rather routine accident--near a town named after the Chumash word for moon. He was rounding a curve on a mountain road near Ojai on his beloved 1996 Harley-Davidson on Thursday morning when he made too wide a turn, rode 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 69.

He was not under the influence of alcohol and was driving only 25 mph when the accident occurred at 11:40 a.m., the California Highway Patrol said Friday. “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.

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.

An inveterate thrill-seeker, Conrad raced formula cars and flew jets, in addition to riding Harleys.

He was making an annual motorcycle trip from Los Angeles to Monterey with a group of friends when the crash occurred.

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

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,” said NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, calling Conrad one of the great aviators and explorers of the 20th century.

Sen. John Glenn, the former astronaut who made a much-ballyhooed return to space at age 77 last year, said that when he spoke with Conrad recently he was excited about the possibility of buying his own jet.

“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 Main Line Philadelphia family on June 2, 1930, Conrad was described by Tom Wolfe in the acclaimed 1979 book “The Right Stuff” as possessing a 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. Charles Conrad Sr.’s success allowed his son to grow up with chauffeurs and maids. But the elder Conrad was an alcoholic, which led to his financial ruin. The future astronaut’s 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’d use soapboxes, thumbtacks and chairs . . . then sit inside for hours pretending to fly,” he told Life magazine in 1963.

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 and blew up Bunsen burners in the science lab. He shaped up at a small boarding school in New York, then 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. But in 1962 he was personally 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.

On Nov. 14, 1969, Apollo 12 was launched. Conrad was commander, accompanied by Richard 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. The spacecraft had been struck by lightning, but no one knew that. Bean feared that the command and service modules had separated.

At that point, Conrad could have aborted the mission “and no one would have said a negative thing,” Bean said. “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, because to abort can be as dangerous as anything.”

“Whoopee!” Conrad shouted as he descended the ladder of his lunar lander on Nov. 19, 1969. “Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”

His words were a takeoff on Apollo 11 commander Armstrong’s line four months earlier: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Conrad often said that Skylab 2, not Apollo 12, was his proudest command. A solar wing had jammed on launch and the astronauts had to pull it out or lose the space station. Through a series of risky maneuvers performed outside the huge floating lab, they managed to slice off the piece of metal that had jammed the wing, which produced an immediate surge in power.

When the crisis was over, Conrad said the trouble had been caused by “one little lousy single bolt.” But the crew’s actions saved the mission and proved, said William C. Schneider, then director of the $2.6-billion Skylab project, that “space is a place where man can live and work and do useful things.”

Conrad’s crew logged 672 hours and 49 minutes each aboard the Skylab’s workshop, a world record for a single mission. Conrad set an individual record for time in space by amassing 1,179 hours and 38 minutes.

After retiring from the Navy in 1973 he entered business, becoming an executive at American Television and Communications Corp. in Denver. Later, at McDonnell Douglas, he championed a craft called the Delta Clipper, or DC-X, a single-stage vehicle that he envisioned as the first reusable rocket and held the promise of flights to Paris in under an hour.

He also created a line of educational comic books about the history of space travel and formed several companies to explore the commercialization of space travel.

“He believed that we needed a new, low-cost reliable way to access space,” Joseph P. Kerwin, a science pilot on Skylab 2, said Friday. Cheered by Glenn’s triumphant flight, Conrad also looked forward to returning to space one day.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy; three sons; and seven grandchildren.

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilson and special correspondent Massie Ritch contributed to this report.