NASA Astronauts Brought Playmates To The Moon

When NASA sent its Apollo astronauts to the moon, it sent them with “cheat sheets” — wrist checklists attached to their suits that outlined the main stages of surface activities for each extravehicular activity (EVA).

But like all flight hardware, crews didn’t train with their real checklists; they trained with a copy and only signed off on the unassembled flight version. Assembling the checklist fell to the backup crew, and also gave them a great opportunity to sneak practical jokes into the mission.

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Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden were the Apollo 12 backup crew supporting Pete Conrad as commander, Al Bean as lunar module pilot, and Dick Gordon as command module pilot respectively. For Scott, being in charge of assembling the checklists was too good an opportunity.

Scott, Irwin, and Worden spent a fair bit of time flipping through the Conrad and Bean’s checklists figuring out where to put in gags. They added a few cartoons and deliberately misspelled “albedo” as “albeano” in Bean’s checklist. But it was the pictures they added that really caught the crew’s attention.

A little over two and a half hours into their first EVA on the moon, Bean flipped to the page in his checklist that described the stages for taking a core tube sample. On the facing page was Cynthia Myers, Playboy’s pick for Miss December 1969. Under the picture was the caption “Don’t forget – Describe the protuberances.”

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