Group 3 (1963)
Alan Bean
Fourth man on the Moon; commanded Skylab 3, then painted what he’d seen.
Alan Bean walked on the Moon as Apollo 12’s lunar module pilot in 1969, then commanded the record-setting 59-day Skylab 3 mission in 1973, where his crew accomplished 150 percent of its planned science workload.
Bean resigned from NASA in 1981 to paint full time, spending four decades creating textured canvases of the lunar landscape — often mixed with moondust from his mission patches — as ‘the only artist who has been there.’