Alan Bean Signed Art Prints

The Apollo program was not only about getting to the moon and back, but making the best possible scientific observations once there. "Do we take test pilots and teach them geology or do we take geologists and teach them to fly?" was the question.

In his book Apollo: An Eyewitness Account, Alan Bean says of Reaching for the Stars, "In one sense this is a painting of a universal astronaut, symbolizing everyone who flew in Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Apollo-Soyuz.

Signed by 24 Astronauts: Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Walt Cunningham, Rusty Schweikart, James McDivitt, James Lovell, Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, Edgar Mitchell, Fred Haise, Charles Duke, Alfred Worden, Paul Weitz, Owen Garriott, Jack Lousma, Bill Pogue, Jerry Carr, Ed Gibson and Tom Stafford

Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon and I were assigned by head astronaut Deke Slayton as the backup crew for Apollo 9. This was super news because this meant we would fly three missions subsequent and make one of the first Moon landings.

I have painted Pete Conrad and myself 239,000 miles from Earth, standing on the Ocean of Storms, looking homeward. Pete and I had come a long way together.


A LIMITED EDITION PRINT

"Rollin' home, rollin' home, at the light of the silvery moon. I'll be happy as a king, believe me, when I go rollin' home": These are the words of an Ol' English drinking ballad. Pete has just rolled Yankee Clipper "heads-up" relative to the north pole of the Earth, and Pete, Dick and I can now see planet Earth out our front windows. We are headed back home, and we all feel like kings.

Except for a couple of lightning strikes during our launch, all has gone well. About 45 minutes ago, the service module engine again performed perfectly, increasing our speed 3,042 feet per second. This increased velocity moved us out of lunar orbit and sent us on the way back to our rendezvous with planet Earth some three days from now.

'Jim Irwin leads Dave Scott as they move about their work on the Moon. Dave observed: “As we advance, we are surrounded by stillness. No wind blows, no sound echoes. Only shadows move. I hear the reassuring purr of the miniaturized machines that supply vital oxygen and shield me from the blistering 250-degree-Fahrenheit surface heat of the lunar morning.” The spacesuit appears bizarre and unworldly, but it contains a life-sustaining environment. Explorers throughout history have probably looked strange and unreal to the natives of the new lands they visited. But we were different. There were no natives and enclosed in our spacesuits we looked like creatures from other planets to our friends and family.’

Every human who walked on the moon did so in his own personal spaceship,” says Alan Bean. “We called them space suits and they performed beautifully on all six lunar landings. I painted astronaut John Young all bundled up in his. John commented, ‘I can’t speak too highly for the pressure suit. Boy that thing really takes a beating.’.

This small but beautiful limited edition canvas shows a close-up of Apollo 15 Lunar Module Pilot, Jim Irwin on the Lunar Surface close to Hadley Rille, capturing photographs on his 70mm Hasselblad Camera. Jim was Alan Bean's Backup on Apollo 12, and Bean has named this print, "My Brother, Jim Irwin" because Jim would often say 'I hope to see you again, brother" whenever he parted ways with Bean after NASA

Apollo 17’s Jack Schmitt takes a moment to let the significance of his lunar exploration sink in. He knows this spot hasn’t changed much over the last three billion years. Now there are signs of visitors from another place: footprints, part of a spaceship, an abandoned car, a flag. Jack contemplates how these traces will remain just as they are for at least the next three billion years or so.