Dancing on the Moon

As the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong’s famous words as he stepped onto the lunar surface have been immortalised. The third man to step foot on the moon, Pete Conrad, had something much wittier to say, but few – if any – could quote his words.

Conrad was not only making a joke at his own expanse, as he was a much shorter man than Neil Armstrong. He was putting to rest accusations that the astronauts’ conversations were scripted for them.

That comedic flair was something he was known for even before he stepped onto the moon. He was said to have “an extraordinary sense of humor” and called “one of the great swingers” by an unnamed friend in an article written about him for an Indiana newspaper the week before his moon landing.

To the Moon and Back

Another article by the Washington Post, written about Conrad’s interview with Jim Hartz in 1979, describes Conrad as “laughing all the way to the moon and back.” Some of that laughter might be attributed to the pranks played on the Apollo 12 crew by the ground crew – pranks such as placing Playboy topless women photos into the astronauts’ instruction booklets.

Despite various disasters on the way to the moon, such as the rocket being struck by lightning twice and the camera being destroyed by being accidentally pointed at the sun, the astronauts were in good spirits.

Compared to the sombre, tense experience of the Apollo 11 landing, there was laughter and joking while the astronauts spent six hours exploring the moon’s surface. Without the pressure of the world watching them, they were free to relax, to frolic a bit.

It was a welcome, light-hearted approach. That whole attitude started with Conrad’s joke when he stepped out of the shuttle and continued with his reference to the moon’s surface as feeling “soft and queasy.” Or when he told one of his fellow astronauts Alan Bean during the spacewalk that he felt “like a giraffe in slow motion.”

Even Death can be Colorful

That humorous outlook on life stayed with Conrad and was even reflected after his death. At the dedication ceremony after his funeral, where NASA planted a tree in his honor, Alan Bean put a light-hearted spin on the sombre occasion. Pretending to be hearing Conrad’s instructions from the afterlife, he requested to have the tree decorated with different colored Christmas lights to all the others, in keeping with Conrad’s famous quote, “When you can’t be good, be colorful.”

So if you ever visit the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center at Christmastime and you see a tree decorated with red lights, you just heard the sound of Pete Conrad laughing.