Apollo 12 made the second crewed Moon landing

On November 19, 1969, the lunar module Intrepid settled onto the Moon’s Ocean of Storms, making Charles “Pete” Conrad and Alan Bean the third and fourth humans to walk on another world. Command module pilot Richard Gordon orbited overhead.

The mission almost ended at the pad. Seconds after the November 14 launch, lightning struck the Saturn V twice, briefly knocking the spacecraft’s systems offline before the crew restored them. Five days later, Conrad guided Intrepid to a pinpoint touchdown within walking distance of Surveyor 3, a robotic probe that had landed in 1967.

“Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me,” the famously short Conrad joked as he stepped down.

The pair logged nearly eight hours of surface work across two moonwalks, deploying instruments and prying pieces off Surveyor 3 to study how spaceflight had weathered them. Apollo 12 proved the first landing was no fluke.