November 14, 1969 -- Florida's Kennedy Space Center. Over 350 feet above Pad 39-A, three astronauts lay inside their Apollo command module Yankee Clipper and waited to be launched on history's second lunar landing mission. Pete Conrad, veteran of two Gemini flights, lay in the commander's couch. Next to him were command module pilot Dick Gordon, who had been Conrad's co-pilot on the Gemini 11 mission, and Al Bean, a rookie who had waited six years for his first trip into space. The three men had known each other for more than a decade, having all been Navy test pilots. They were already best friends; now they would go to the moon together.
First, however, they had to reach Earth orbit. But that was no sure thing on this November day. Storm clouds had gathered even as the astronauts had awoken, eaten breakfast and donned their spacesuits. By the time they were sealed into the command module, Conrad and his crew could see trickles of water on Yankee Clipper's windows. Some 3.5 miles away, launch controllers reviewed the situation and ruled that conditions were safe for launch. It was a fateful decision.
Thirty seconds after liftoff, Conrad saw a bright flash through his window. Seconds later, he and his crewmates heard the wail of the master alarm in their headphones. When he glanced at the instrument panel, Conrad saw more warning lights than he'd ever encountered in any simulation on Earth. Something was very wrong with the spacecraft's electrical system.
What no one had yet realized was that Apollo 12 had been struck by lightning. As the Saturn booster sped through rain clouds, it had become the world's longest lightning rod. A bolt of electricity had struck the spacecraft and traveled all the way to the ground, 6,000 feet below, along the column of hot, charged gases of the Saturn's exhaust plume. The bolt had knocked Yankee Clipper's power-producing fuel cells off line, and had even jolted the command module's navigation system. No Apollo mission had ever been aborted -- was Apollo 12 about to become the first?
In Houston, experts in Mission Control struggled to understand what was happening aboard Apollo 12. Flight director Gerry Griffin turned to 24-year-old controller John Aaron, who was responsible for the electrical system, and asked, "What do you see?" Aaron couldn't see much -- a meaningless jumble of numbers had replaced all the telemetry from the spacecraft. Everyone knew that the mighty Saturn 5 booster was still propelling the astronauts toward space with 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Would it stay on course?
Inside Yankee Clipper, Conrad heard a request from Houston: "Apollo 12, try S-C-E to Auxiliary." Conrad had no idea what that meant, but Bean did. When he flipped the switch, Mission Control had their data back.
Fortunately, the Saturn's own guidance system was functioning perfectly, steering Apollo 12 on the proper path toward orbit. With a tremendous jolt, the astronauts felt the spent first stage fall away and the second stage ignite, right on schedule. As they sped onward, the men put the fuel cells back on line -- they would fix the rest of the problems after Yankee Clipper reached Earth orbit. Then, with a blast from their third-stage engine, they would head for the moon. For now, Conrad and his crew knew that with the help of mission control, they had just escaped a brush with failure. And they laughed the rest of the way into orbit.
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