About Alan Bean

My father, Alan was born on March 15, 1932 to Arnold and Frances Bean in Wheeler, Texas. Arnold was a soil scientist for the U.S Department of Agriculture, and his work took the Bean family throughout small towns in Texas and Louisiana, eventually settling in Fort Worth when Dad was in middle school.

From a young age, Dad had a passion for flight which led him to join the Naval Reserves and then earn an aeronautical engineering degree through a Naval ROTC scholarship at The University of Texas at Austin. A Naval Aviator, he flew A4s off the coast of Florida, and earned a spot at the United States Naval Test Pilot School where Naval aircraft are pushed to their limits before deployment to the fleet.

In 1963 Dad was selected in the 3rd Astronaut group. They were the men who were expected to fly Apollo to the moon, and they did. On Dad’s first space flight he was the Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 12 crew with Commander Pete Conrad, and Command Module Pilot Dick Gordon. Their Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning less than a minute after launch throwing the spacecraft’s electrical system offline, but with the expertise of Mission Control Dad famously flipped the “SCE-to-Aux” switch to reset the system and the mission was saved. Conrad, Gordon, and Bean explored the moon’s Ocean of Storms in November 1969.

Dad returned to space as the Commander of the Skylab II mission in 1973. Spending 59 days aboard America’s first space station orbiting 270 miles over the Earth with US Marine Pilot Jack Lousma and Scientist Owen Garriott. Dad believed he was the Best Astronaut he could be aboard Skylab. He was a seasoned Astronaut by then, and the crew accomplished 150% of their goals, an unbeaten NASA record.

In 1981 my father left the space program to pursue a new dream, to paint the story of Apollo, what he saw and felt on the moon as only a man who has been there can. Inspired by Explorer Artists, Fredric Remington and Charles Russell who painted man’s journey into the American West, Dad painted man’s first journey from Earth to explore our moon. “An Astronaut who became an Artist” is how Dad described himself when first left NASA. Later he realized “I am an Artist who was lucky enough to be an Astronaut.”

My father was healthy and active till the end, painting at his easel days before his death from a stroke on May 26, 2018.