Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean is coming to Central New York. Bean will be here to discuss "My Experience as an Artist on the Moon" as part of the Project Fibonacci STEAM Conference series of speakers on August 3rd. We got to chat with the famous moonwalker, and ask him some interesting questions about his experiences with space travel. 

Alan Bean made his first flight into space aboard Apollo 12, the second manned mission to land on the Moon, at the age of thirty-seven years in November 1969. He made his second and final flight into space on the Skylab 3 mission in 1973, the second manned mission to the Skylab space station. After retiring from NASA in 1981, he pursued his interest in painting, depicting various space-related scenes and documenting his own experiences in space as well as that of his fellow Apollo program astronauts.

Here's Alan talking about his Apollo 12 experiences:

 

Bean was 1 of 12 lucky men to walk on the surface of the moon so far. The last astronauts to walk on the moon were mission Commander Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Rumor has it, before Cernan left the moon, he carved his 9-year-old daughter's initials TDC (Teresa "Tracy" Dawn Cernan) on the surface. Is this true? Also, did Bean do anything like this on the moon?:

 

Along with walking on the Moon, Bean also took part in America's first space station Skylab in 1973. We got to talk about that, and how Alan was known as the "DJ in space" in the Apollo missions:

 

NASA’s Orion spacecraft is built to take humans farther than they’ve ever gone before. Orion will serve as the exploration vehicle that will bring us back to the moon, Mars, and beyond. But when will this happen? What are Alan's thoughts on going back to the Moon and Beyond?:

 

 

Tickets for Alan Bean are available to the public and are on sale for $20 up until the 30th so if anybody's interested they can purchase online, or buy them in person at Big Apple Music, Spressos in Rome, The Beaches, or the Savoy.

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