Pete Conrad 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 onto the lunar surface, Conrad joked about his own
Of a Fire on the Moon module struts. Thus, the coffee table book came inside its own lunar-themed "coffee table", with an uneven surface (see photograph). The package included a numbered print of the of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon, framed in plexiglass and signed by the astronaut himself—and enclosed a lunar meteorite. Only 12 were created and the price was $112,500. Norman Mailer died two years before the package was launched. A conventional hard back edition of the same volume was released in 2015. The painting on the cover of the first edition (Little, Brown & Co, 1970) is "Le Monde Invisible", a 1954