by Gideon Marcus

Just four months ago, men first set foot on the Moon, fulfilling a millennia-long dream of humanity as well as culminating a decade-long Space Race between the superpowers. And the question on everyone's lips: how do you top that?

It's important to remember that the flight of Apollo 11 was not the end, but only a beginning—just as John Glenn's orbital flight, Gus Grissom's mission in Gemini 3, Wally Schirra's in Apollo 7 were all beginnings. The Moon Port is open, and it is time to start the exploration of the cosmos in earnest.

Appropriately, the flight of Apollo 12 was planned to mark an incremental expansion upon the prior mission's success. Scheduled for a November 14 launch at 11:22AM Eastern time months in advance, the second lunar mission would include the following improvements:

• Time spent on the Moon would be 32 hours, half again more than the 21 hours spent by Apollo 11.
• There would be two Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) rather than one.
• The astronauts would set up a series of experiments designed to operate for one year from the lunar surface.
• The Lunar Module (LM) would execute a pinpoint landing at Site 7 in the Sea of Storms, as opposed to the less precise touchdown made by Eagle in July
• As a result, the astronauts would be able to recover the TV camera from Surveyor 3, which had soft-landed on the Moon two years prior.
• The Moonwalks would be televised in color this time.
• After lunar exploration, Apollo 12 would spend an extra day in lunar orbit photographing future landing sites.

In all, Apollo 12 promised to be only slightly more ambitious than its predecessor, but how much more ambitious than a flight to the Moon do you need?

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