Author(s): Nancy Conrad

Biographies & Memoirs

Astronaut Pete Conrad's Incredible Ride to the Moon and Beyond

He was the third man on the moon, but he was the first to dance on it. This is a personal story almost too amazing to be true, as seen through the eyes of the original Space Cowboy. For Pete Conrad, it was all about the ride. Whether he was hotdogging at Mach 2, test-flying every supersonic jet the Navy developed (and some they shouldn?t have), orbiting the Earth at almost twenty thousand miles per hour, or redlining his Corvette, he loved pushing the envelope. Pete wasn?t the squeaky-clean astronaut poster boy. He was the guy every NASA pilot wanted to go to happy hour with after work and the man they would kill to fly with. And Pete had a natural outspokenness that caused him to wash out of the Mercury program. But the ?Comeback Kid? roared back ? flying two Gemini missions, walking on the Moon as commander of Apollo 12, commanding the first Skylab, and logging more time in space than all the original astronauts combined. This is a surprisingly candid insider?s view of the greatest ride in history: America?s glorious race to the stars, as seen through the eyes of a real space cowboy.