News

Artist James Hervat is proud to announce that his painting, "Apollo 12, Kind of a Rough Start..." has been included in a new permanent exhibit at the NASA Langley Research Center's Virginia Air and Space Center, located in Hampton, Virginia. The artwork is displayed alongside the actual Apollo 12 Command Module "Yankee Clipper" which carried astronauts Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Dick Gordon to the Moon and back fifty years ago this November.

The painting depicts the dramatic start of Apollo 12's journey to the Moon, when the 365-foot Saturn V launch vehicle was struck by lightning twice within the first minute after liftoff. The hundred-million volt lightning strikes disabled the spacecraft's fuel cell power supply and scrambled telemetry signals to Mission Control, preventing engineers on the ground from even knowing what was happening. With the time window for a decision to abort the mission rapidly closing, a 24-year-old engineer--in true Hollywood fashion--stepped...