美国国家公共电台 NPR Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Astronaut Who Walked On The Moon, Dies At 86

 

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

One of the astronauts who walked on the moon has died. Alan Bean was on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing in 1969. He flew in space one more time after that, but it was what he did post-NASA that really left a mark. He died yesterday in Houston. He was 86 years old. NPR's Russell Lewis has this remembrance.

RUSSELL LEWIS, BYLINE¹: As the lunar module² pilot on Apollo 12, it was Alan Bean's job to help commander Pete Conrad as he approached the moon, monitoring systems and calling out the descent rate.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ALAN BEAN: Ninety-six feet coming down 6, slow down the descent rate. Eighty feet coming down at four - you're looking good.

LEWIS: Just a few minutes after they landed, Bean and Conrad were struck by the view out the window.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BEAN: Holy crud, it's beautiful out here!

PETE CONRAD: It sure is. It's something else.

LEWIS: Bean spent 31 hours on the moon. He and Conrad collected lunar samples and deployed³ several experiments. They were busy almost the whole time, but as Bean recalled during a 2016 NPR interview, he also had a few moments to take it all in.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

BEAN: And as I ran along, I remember looking up and saying to myself, you know, this - this is really the moon. We're really here. It was amazing to us, too. That's the Earth up there. And I said it two or three times to myself.

LEWIS: After Apollo, Bean commanded the second Skylab mission in 1973, orbiting the Earth 59 days. Later, he was in line to fly the first shuttle flights, but he had a change of heart.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

BEAN: So the more I thought about it, the more I realized there were young men and women at NASA in the astronaut office that could fly the shuttle as good as I could or better, but I was the only one interested in trying to do this other job.

LEWIS: That other job - it was to paint. So he left NASA. He'd had an engineering background and was a test pilot in the Navy, but he'd also taken art lessons at night. It was something he always wanted to do full time. For more than four decades after his space career, he chronicled the six missions that landed on the moon.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

BEAN: I feel blessed. Every day when I'm working on these paintings, I think, boy, am I lucky to be the first artist to ever go to another world and try to tell stories that people care about.

LEWIS: In painstaking⁴ detail, he recreated what it was like to be on the moon. His paintings included moon dust and ground-up remnants of Apollo spacecraft and were textured⁵ using tools from his lunar trip. But for all Bean brought back from the moon, he left something behind - his silver astronaut lapel pin, which he had thrown into a crater⁶ as far as he could.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

BEAN: This - what I think about often - when I look at the moon at night, I look up and think about that pin up there, just as shiny as it ever was. And someday maybe somebody will go pick it up.

LEWIS: Mementos⁷ were important to Alan Bean. He believed one day, humans might colonize⁸ the moon, and he hoped they'd display one of his paintings. He wanted future explorers to use it as inspiration to never stop moving outward. Russell Lewis, NPR News.

1 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

2 module   

n.组件，模块，模件；(航天器的)舱

参考例句：

• The centre module displays traffic guidance information.中央模块显示交通引导信息。
• Two large tanks in the service module held liquid oxygen.服务舱的两个大气瓶中装有液态氧。

3 deployed   

（尤指军事行动）使展开( deploy的过去式和过去分词 )； 施展； 部署； 有效地利用

参考例句：

• Tanks have been deployed all along the front line. 沿整个前线已部署了坦克。
• The artillery was deployed to bear on the fort. 火炮是对着那个碉堡部署的。

4 painstaking   

adj.苦干的；艰苦的，费力的，刻苦的

参考例句：

• She is not very clever but she is painstaking.她并不很聪明，但肯下苦功夫。
• Through years of our painstaking efforts,we have at last achieved what we have today.大家经过多少年的努力，才取得今天的成绩。

5 textured   

adj.手摸时有感觉的, 有织纹的

参考例句：

• The shoe's sole had a slightly textured surface. 鞋底表面稍感粗糙。
• Shallow burial seems to preserve chalky textured porosity. 浅埋藏似能保留具白垩状结构的孔隙。

6 crater   

n.火山口，弹坑

参考例句：

• With a telescope you can see the huge crater of Ve-suvius.用望远镜你能看到巨大的维苏威火山口。
• They came to the lip of a dead crater.他们来到了一个死火山口。

7 mementos   

纪念品，令人回忆的东西( memento的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The museum houses a collection of mementos, materials and documents. 博物馆保存着很多回忆录以及文献资料。
• This meant, however, that no one was able to retrieve irreplaceable family mementos. 然而，这也意味着谁也没能把无可替代的家庭纪念品从火中救出来。

8 colonize   

v.建立殖民地，拓殖；定居，居于

参考例句：

• Around 700 Arabs began to colonize East Africa.公元700年阿拉伯人开始把东非变为殖民地。
• Japan used to colonize many countries in Asia.日本曾经殖民过许多亚洲国家。