They made it look easy. On Nov. 19, 1969, Pete Conrad, Al Bean and the Apollo 12 mission team grounded their Lunar Module merely 163 meters from the Surveyor 3 robotic spacecraft, which had soft-landed two and a half years earlier. They had planned precisely where they were going; but they made the pinpoint landing totally blind. This amazing feat confirmed that sites on the Moon could be serviced predictably. Few might have guessed it would be 50 years before Conrad's proof-of-piloting could be put into commercial practice.
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