Project Gemini Conrad joined NASA as part of the second group of astronauts, known as the
New Nine, on September 17, 1962. Regarded as one of the best pilots in the group, he was among the first of his group to be assigned a Gemini mission. As pilot of
Gemini 5 he, along with his commander
Gordon Cooper, set a new space endurance record of eight days. The duration of the Gemini 5 flight was actually 7 days 22 hours and 55 minutes, surpassing the then-current Russian record of five days. Eight days was the time required for the first crewed lunar landing missions. Conrad facetiously referred to the Gemini 5 capsule as
a flying garbage can. Conrad tested many spacecraft systems essential to the
Apollo program. He was also one of the smallest of the astronauts, tall, so he found the confinement of the Gemini capsule less onerous than his Commander Gordon Cooper did. He was then named commander of the
Gemini 8 backup crew, and later commander of
Gemini 11 with pilot
Richard Gordon. Gemini 11 docked with an
Agena target vehicle immediately after achieving orbit. Such a maneuver was an engineering and flight test similar to what the Apollo Command Module (CM) and Lunar Module (LM) would later be required to do. Also, the Gemini 11 flight holds the distinction of being the highest-apogee crewed Earth orbit ever, reaching an
apogee of .
Apollo program ladder, moments before becoming the third human to walk on the Moon Conrad was assigned in December 1966 to command the backup crew for the first Earth orbital test flight of the complete
Apollo spacecraft, including the
Lunar Module (LM) into
low Earth orbit. Delays in the LM's development pushed this mission to December 1968 as Apollo 8. But when one more delay occurred in readying the first LM for crewed flight, NASA approved and scheduled a lunar orbit mission without the LM as
Apollo 8, pushing Conrad's backup mission to
Apollo 9 in March 1969. Director of Flight Crew Operations
Deke Slayton's practice was to assign a backup crew as the prime crew on the third following mission. If the swap of 8 and 9 had not occurred, Conrad might have commanded
Apollo 11, the first mission to land on the Moon. On November 14, 1969,
Apollo 12 was launched with Conrad as commander,
Dick Gordon as
Command Module Pilot, and
Alan Bean as Lunar Module Pilot. The launch was the most harrowing of the Apollo program, as a series of lightning strikes just after liftoff temporarily knocked out power and guidance in the Command Module. Five days later, after stepping down from the ladder of the Lunar Module onto a landing pad, Conrad joked about his own small stature by remarking: He later revealed that he said this in order to win a bet he had made with the Italian journalist
Oriana Fallaci for $500 to prove that NASA did not script astronaut comments. Fallaci was convinced that Armstrong's "One small step for man" statement had been written for him and was not his own words. Conrad's "long one" referred to the jump from the Lunar Module's ladder to a landing pad, whereas Armstrong's "small step" referred to the small step from the landing pad onto the Moon's surface. Conrad's first words on the lunar surface were: One of the photos that Conrad took during the mission with his own image visible on the helmet visor of Alan Bean was later listed on
Popular Sciences photo gallery of the best
astronaut selfies.
Skylab Conrad's final mission was as commander of
Skylab 2, the first crew to board the
Skylab space station. The station had been damaged on its uncrewed launch, when its
micrometeoroid shield tore away, taking one of two main solar panels with it and jamming the other one so that it could not deploy. Conrad and his crew repaired the damage on two
spacewalks. Conrad managed to pull free the stuck solar panel by sheer brute force, an action of which he was particularly proud. The astronauts also erected a "parasol" solar shield to protect the station from intense solar heating, a function which the lost micrometeoroid shield was supposed to perform. Without the shield, Skylab and its contents would have become unusable. President
Jimmy Carter honored Conrad for this in 1978 by awarding him the
Congressional Space Medal of Honor. During his training for Skylab 2, Conrad had to bail out from NASA
T-38 N957NA on May 10, 1972. He was returning to Houston from a visit to
ILC Industries in
Delaware. On approach to
Ellington AFB, he was advised that the weather had deteriorated below minimums so he diverted to Hobby. During the night,
instrument flight rules (IFR) descent, he suffered a generator failure at 800 feet and broke off the approach. He elected to divert to an airfield with better weather. He ran out of fuel as he reached
Bergstrom AFB and was forced to eject at 3,700 feet. He landed about 100 yards from the base operations building and his airplane crashed in an open field about two miles away. ==Post-NASA career==