Destination moon

Early one morning in the spring of 1969, a young man stood in the parking lot of a Florida motel, waiting to catch a glimpse of a NASA astronaut.

A brief encounter would have a lasting impact, though no one involved realized it at the time.

Drawn together by the love of all things space-related, a chance meeting between a young dreamer and a lifelong funseeker has evolved over time into a real friendship.

Twelve-year-old Andrew Chaikin's parents took him to Kennedy Space Center in Florida in April 1969 as an advanced birthday present. An avid space fan, Chaikin thought his trip couldn't get any better. But, just by luck, his mom booked his family into the motel where the astronauts always stayed while on training missions at the cape.

"I actually met seven astronauts by waiting out in the parking lot as they came out of their rooms and went to their cars," Chaikin told the Deseret News in a phone interview from his home in southern Vermont. "The first one I met was Alan Bean."

"I came out in the morning and there he was," Bean said from his art studio in Texas. "He started talking to me, and then I introduced him to Dick and Pete — Dick Gordon and Pete Conrad — who were friendly."

Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, never imagined the impact he would have on Chaikin, who has been involved in astronomy in one form or another his entire life. "There's no machine that will measure the hits on a man's heart," Bean said. "You don't know which ones will remember you and exactly what you say. I never knew that just talking to a young boy … would ever have the effect it did. He was fertile ground for astronauts."

Taking flight

When Bean was a child, there weren't astronauts or spaceships, but there were pilots and airplanes. He was intrigued by flight and thought it would make an exciting career, until he saw Al Shepard go up in a rocket. Bean had thought his job as a Navy test pilot was the best in the world, but that moment changed his mind.

"That's how I ended up in the space program," he said. "It looked like it would be the most fun of any job I could have in my life. And it turned out to be that way."

Being selected to go to the moon on Apollo 12 was the chance of a lifetime for Bean. But contrary to what people might think, going to the moon was in large part what Bean expected. He had spent months training in simulators and different locations, and the training was meant to eliminate surprises. What did surprise him, though, were the views.