Pete Conrad
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Pete Conrad served on Gemini 5 and 11, Apollo 12, and Skylab 2 missions, and may have been scheduled for the Apollo 20 mission, which was cancelled. Conrad stepped onto the moon on November 19, 1969, which was just four months after Armstrong's historic moonwalk. Conrad and astronaut Alan Bean spent seven hours and 45 minutes on the lunar surface.
In doing so, Pete Conrad became the third person to walk on the moon. He was one of the most colorful of the early astronauts, one of the most fun to be around, and he was in many ways their minstrel the man who had an inexhaustible supply of stories about the space age.
Prior to his historic moonwalk, Conrad was the pilot of the Gemini 5 mission in 1965, which set an endurance record in orbiting the earth. A year later, Conrad commanded Gemini 11, which docked with another craft during orbit and set a space altitude record of 850 miles. He also served on a Skylab mission.
Pete Conrad joined NASA after working as an aeronautical engineer and Navy test pilot. He officially became an astronaut in 1962, three years after the first seven astronauts were announced. Michael Collins, another Apollo astronaut, summed up Conrad this way: "Funny, noisy, colorful, cool, competent; snazzy dresser, race-car driver.
