Apollo 12 Lost Its Color Camera When Alan Bean Accidentally Pointed It At The Sun During The First Moonwalk

The Apollo 12 story trending this week is one of spaceflight's great painful accidents, a reminder that even the most meticulously prepared missions in history can be undone by a moment's inattention.

On November 19, 1969, astronaut Alan Bean stepped onto the lunar surface during Apollo 12's first EVA carrying the most advanced color television camera ever deployed in space. Before mounting it on a tripod, he briefly pointed it toward the sun.

That was enough. The unfiltered solar radiation immediately burned out the secondary vidicon tube, the part of the camera that converts light into electronic signals. The camera was dead before Conrad and Bean had properly begun their moonwalk.

The consequences were significant. Apollo 11 had only a grainy black-and-white feed. Apollo 12 was supposed to be the mission with vivid, broadcast-quality color coverage of astronauts walking on the Moon.

Instead, NASA's mission controllers stared at a burned-out screen. A 16mm film camera captured some footage, but viewers on Earth who tuned in for color television were left with nothing.

Bean later said he suspected the sun damage happened while he was adjusting the camera for a shot of Pete Conrad, swinging the lens across the lunar sky a fraction too far. NASA installed lens filters and added sun-avoidance protocols on every subsequent mission.

Apollo 13 through 17 all had working cameras. None of the footage they returned would have existed without the lesson Bean accidentally provided first.