Apollo 12 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying astronauts Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean toward the second crewed lunar landing. Just 36 seconds into flight, lightning struck the Saturn V rocket, knocking out fuel cells and scrambling instrument readings. Quick action by 24-year-old flight controller John Aaron, who recognized an obscure telemetry pattern, allowed the crew to restore power and continue safely to the Moon.
Rain clouds hung heavy over Cape Kennedy on launch morning, but NASA proceeded anyway, eager to keep pace with its ambitious lunar schedule. Thirty-six seconds after Apollo 12 thundered off the pad, the Saturn V rocket triggered a massive lightning strike as it punched through the storm clouds, sending a jolt through the spacecraft's electrical systems.
Inside the command module, warning lights flared across the entire instrument panel as the fuel cells disconnected and telemetry data turned into meaningless static on the ground. Commander Pete Conrad calmly narrated the chaos to Houston: 'We just lost the platform, gang. I don't know what happened here.' At Mission Control, a young flight controller named John Aaron recognized the garbled data pattern from a obscure test he had studied months earlier and called out an obscure command: 'Try SCE to Aux.'
Few in the room, including the astronauts, knew what that switch even did, but Alan Bean found it and flipped it, restoring telemetry instantly. The mission continued without further incident, and Conrad and Bean went on to land on the Moon's Ocean of Storms days later, walking within sight of the earlier Surveyor 3 probe. Aaron's split-second recall of an obscure switch became legendary within NASA as a case study in preparation meeting crisis.