Alan Bean continues artistic journey

Alan Bean always had a creative streak: As a child, tinkering with his model airplanes until they became perfect little replicas of the real thing, and later, proposing aircraft paint designs during his military career.

After he became an astronaut, he took evening art classes as his pilot training allowed. But once he left NASA in 1981 after 18 years, Bean began his artistic career in earnest, mining his own memories to capture images of faraway worlds.

One of an elite dozen astronauts who have walked on the moon, Bean the artist found a new mission: To share his explorations through his paintings, capturing splendours of the moon that are difficult to express in words alone.

They're not like Earth paintings. They don't look like Earth paintings," Bean said. They're paintings from another world."

Bean's art is on display at the LBJ Library and Museum at the University of Texas and coincides with the museum's exhibit To the Moon: The American Space Program in the 1960s.

Bean, 76, was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12 in November 1969 when he became the fourth person to step foot on the moon. The mission was man's second lunar landing, and scenes from that trip -- along with depictions of fellow astronauts' moon visits and occasional fantasy elements tossed in -- comprise Bean's collection of paintings.

He was training to become a space shuttle commander when he decided to leave NASA, where he helped set 11 world records in space and astronautics.

I said, 'You know, there's a lot of young men and women around here that can fly this shuttle as good as I can or better. Maybe if I left the space program, which I dearly loved, and painted some of my experiences that I could leave a legacy for future generations that somebody might care about,'" Bean said.

Read more from the AP HERE.

In The Shadow Of The Moon

Documentary: US - 86 minutes

Sandra Hall, reviewer -The Sydney Morning Herald

Alan Bean of the Apollo 12 crew has always thought of himself as one of the more fearful astronauts. Lift-off sent his heart rate shooting up to 144 beats a minute. In contrast, the heart of John Young, the sleepy-eyed slow talker who captained the Apollo 16 flight, kept ticking away at a steady 70.

So astronauts are human - something that didn't dawn on the rest of us until Tom Wolfe dramatised the backstage story of America's first manned space missions in The Right Stuff. Since then, we've known the astronauts best through their on-screen alter egos. The real-life models have merged into that emblematic figure - Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon while intoning those sonorous words: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

So this documentary, which combines film taken during the space voyages with footage of the era and interviews with the astronauts, arrives late in the day. Yet just a few minutes in, you begin to realise that the long gap between recollection and reality makes it all the more revealing.

The director, David Sington, has gathered crew members from every Apollo mission that flew to the moon and these men, with their space careers long behind them, prove a wry and reflective bunch who rejoice in bringing the wisdom of hindsight to their experiences. They belong to a select company. The Apollo program ended in 1972, which means they are still the only humans to have walked on the lunar surface.

All were former test pilots and they remind us that if they hadn't gone to the moon, they would have gone to Vietnam. Gene Cernan, who captained the last Apollo flight, still sounds rueful about this. "They were fighting my war for me," he says of the test pilots with whom he trained. He remembers, too, that they were being shot down on combat missions while he was front-page news as the latest spaceman.

The footage filmed by the astronauts has been transferred to high-definition tape and looks spectacular. None of them has a gift for poetry, but one finds the right words when he comments on the jewel-like nature of Earth hanging in the blackness of space. Others talk about how fragile it looks. There's nothing like leaving the Earth's atmosphere, I imagine, to sharpen your sense of attachment to the one place in the cosmos you can call home.

The moon elicits less poetry. Michael Collins, who flew with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11, remembers it as a hostile, scary place. That was from above. He had no chance to get closer for he was the one who stayed aboard the spacecraft. Was he disappointed? It seems not. Rather, he relished his unique perspective. He was able to look down on Earth with its billions of people and on the moon with just two.

He also knew he could return to Earth - unlike Jim Lovell and the rest of the crew of Apollo 13, whose mission was cut short by a systems failure. The moon ceased to matter as they became consumed by the question of how to get home. Home. For all the astronauts, it seems, their trips into space intensified their love of Earth. As for their spiritual nourishment, some credit their lunar adventures with awakening or renewing their interest in religion. Others, such the humorous and very likeable Collins, say merely that after you've flown to the moon some of our terrestrial squabbles don't seem nearly as important.

See the Trailer HERE.

Exoskeleton shows running best on Moon

NewScientist.com news service
David Shiga, Cambridge

Video Available

Future astronauts should run, not walk, across the lunar surface to conserve energy, new laboratory tests suggest. The tests were done using an MIT-built exoskeleton that mimics the experience of moving around in a spacesuit.

Astronauts move differently on the Moon than on Earth because of the Moon's weaker gravity and the constricting properties of spacesuits. So Christopher Carr and Dava Newman of MIT in Cambridge, US, have devised a way to simulate that motion in the hopes of designing better spacesuits and planning future lunar activities.

They reasoned that walking inside a pressurised spacesuit is like wearing an air-filled balloon. Like balloons, the suits resist bending and tend to want to return to their original shape, making it harder for Moon-walking astronauts to bend their legs at the knee.

So the researchers built an exoskeleton to simulate this, based on a design by another MIT scientist, Hugh Herr, who creates devices to aid people with disabilities. The exoskeleton consists of fibreglass rods that run the length of the wearer's legs and clip into modified cycling shoes.

Like a pressurised spacesuit, the exoskeleton resists bending at the knee, applying a force that tends to straighten the leg again. Intriguingly, this spring-like property makes running more efficient than walking for an exoskeleton-clad person. That's because the extra springiness helps to recover a higher percentage of the energy put into each stride while running.

The researchers believe that the same effect makes running the more efficient choice for space-suited astronauts on the Moon, something they had already suspected from watching videos of Apollo lunar missions. "The spacesuit is storing energy," Carr says, explaining that the air-filled spacesuit legs act like springs.

Less restrictive

Indeed, Apollo astronauts have reported such experiences. "It seems like I could run forever on the Moon and my legs would not get tired," wrote Alan Bean in a book describing his 1969 visit to the lunar surface. And Harrison Schmitt, the last Apollo astronaut to set foot on the Moon, said he skied across the surface, becoming "the fastest man on the Moon."

Knowing that running is more efficient than walking could help future astronauts explore the Moon or Mars, Carr says. "If you're out somewhere stuck in your spacesuit, running low on oxygen, and you have to get back to base, you should run, not walk, because the energy per unit distance is lower for running," he told New Scientist.

It is also an important consideration for mission planners designing safety rules for astronauts, he says. In the Apollo missions, NASA had rules about how far astronauts could venture from the safe haven of their lunar lander, based on how far they could safely walk before their spacesuit oxygen would run out.

"It turns out that walking is not the most efficient way," Carr says. "If you knew that you could run back, then potentially you could be less restrictive in your mission."

For the full effect of Moon walking, the laboratory Carr and Newman used for their research can also simulate lunar gravity. By tying the exoskeleton-clad person to a cord that runs up to the ceiling and is attached to a spring, the researchers can adjust the downward force to match the Moon's surface gravity, which is one-sixth that of Earth.

Exoskeleton Study