And then there were four.
Alan Bean, who was the fourth human being to set foot on the moon, died on Saturday in Houston. He was 86. Bean, whose trip as the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12 was his first flight in space, returned to space four years later as part of the crew of America’s first space station, Skylab.
Bean spent much of his post-NASA career as an artist, painting the scenes that he called himself fortunate to have seen first hand. Beans paintings often attempted to catch what he saw as a transformative, spiritual element of seeing the Earth from a distance, an experience that had a lasting impact on his view of both the world and himself.
“Alan Bean was the most extraordinary person I ever met,” said astronaut Mike Massimino, who flew on two space shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope. “He was a one of a kind combination of technical achievement as an astronaut and artistic achievement as a painter.”
“But what was truly extraordinary was his deep caring for others and his willingness to inspire and teach by sharing his personal journey so openly. Anyone who had the opportunity to know Alan was a better person for it, and we were better astronauts by following his example. I am so grateful he was my mentor and friend, and I will miss him terribly. He was a great man and this is a great loss,” Massimino said.
Astronaut John Young died in January, a year after Gene Cernan. With the loss of Alan Bean, there are now only four men still alive who have walked on another world: Buzz Aldrin, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, David Scott, and Charles Duke. Of the remaining moon-walkers, Aldrin is the oldest at 88. Schmitt and Duke are 82. It seems highly unlikely that any mission will manage to bridge the generation of those who took part in Apollo with fresh footsteps on another world.
History has spurts and then is steady, and then maybe even backing up a step, and then forward again. —Alan Bean