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It was November 19, 1969, and U.S. astronaut Alan Bean was taking part in human history’s second-ever moonwalk. Standing on the lunar surface, he flipped a page of the mission checklist affixed to his wrist, and there it was: a heavenly body he didn’t expect—Playboy’s Miss December 1968, in a Santa hat and nothing else.
NASA’s wrist checklists were the NFL quarterback wristband playbooks of space travel. The moon to-do lists of Bean’s predecessors, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had been brief enough to fit on a single panel sewn onto their sleeves. But on the Apollo 12 mission, Bean and mission commander Charles “Pete” Conrad had 3.5-inch-square, spiral-bound booklets of 30-plus pages each, strapped above their spacesuits’ left gloves.
Cryptic, acronym-laden, short-hand instructions covered everything from setting up the solar wind spectrometer to sampling the lunar surface. But two and a half hours into Bean’s and Conrad’s lunar walk, it became evident that their checklists had been… augmented.
Space Rapture
Prankster colleagues on the Apollo 12 mission had clipped Playboy Playmate Cynthia Myers, in her Santa hat, from a centerfold, copied the image onto agency-approved, fireproof, plastic-coated paper and added the caption: DON’T FORGET – DESCRIBE THE PROTUBERANCES.
When Bean saw it, he started laughing into his mic. A few more page flips exposed Miss January 1969 Leslie Bianchini, with the instruction: SURVEY – HER ACTIVITY.
He hopped over to Conrad whose checklist had also been covertly amended before lift-off, sporting Miss September 1967 Angela Dorian with a coy smile and the annotation SEEN ANY INTERESTING HILLS AND VALLEYS?; and Miss October 1967 Reagan Wilson, leaning back against a stack of hay bales, tousled hair, open shirt, and the caption PREFERRED TETHER PARTNER. The pair of Navy officers were giggling like schoolboys.
Back on Earth, Houston thought they had a problem. Was something awry with the oxygen mix? Were the astronauts intoxicated? Had they succumbed to the mysterious astral affliction of “space rapture”?
With Apollo 12’s return to Earth, photo evidence of the prank was put on restricted access and NASA stayed tight-lipped about the lunar giggle fit. For a whole quarter-century, only agency insiders were in on the joke—until a December 1994 Playboy tell-all by writer D.C. Agle spilled the beans on how four Playmates tagged along for a moonwalk.1
“It was tough, lonely work for the astronauts of Apollo 12 in the ocean of storms,” Agle wrote. “Luckily, they had company.”
Why the secrecy? “We thought some people back on Earth might become upset if they found out we had Playboy Playmates in our checklists,” Bean confessed. “They would have said, ‘This is where our tax money is going?'”
Holy Grail of Checklists
Conrad passed away in 1999. His checklist is behind glass alongside his suit at Space Center Houston. Bean died in 2018, leaving his possessions to family. This week, his estate goes up for auction, in Heritage Auctions’ Space Exploration Signature Auction #6340, July 23 and 24.
Artifacts include Bean’s extravehicular gloves and his surface-used geological hammer (which he also put to use in his later-in-life career as a painter). Heritage’s director of space exploration-related auctions, Brad Palmer, has seen a lot of lunar-flown artifacts cross the auction block in his tenure—including in the sale of Neil Armstrong’s estate in 2019—but Palmer is titillated about this collection.
“These are things that’ve never been sold before,” he says. Artifacts actually put to use on the lunar surface are “next-level” for space collectors. Anything flown in a spacecraft is big; flown to the moon is bigger, he adds, but something taken out of the landing module and used on the lunar surface is “the highest level of all space collectibles.”
Bean’s infamous wrist checklist in particular is a real get, Palmer explains: “There have been other checklists sold in the past… But this one, the story behind it, it’s kind of the holy grail.”
The bidding starts at $100,000, and Palmer expects private space industry billionaires or their representatives will be among those raising a paddle: “I’d be surprised if it goes for less than half a million dollars,” he says.
”The Playmates were a dear memento of the real world and the way it was,” Conrad told Playboy in ‘94. The astronauts may both be no longer with us, but the laugh they shared on the moon lives on.
- Charles Fishman One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon ↩︎