American astronaut Alan Bean (born in 1932) was the fourth person to ever walk on the moon. In November 1969, he and Pete Conrad made the second moon landing in history in their Apollo 12 Lunar Module Intrepid, while their crewmate Dick Gordon orbited the moon in Apollo 12's Command Module Yankee Clipper.

Alan Bean was born in Wheeler, Texas on March 15, 1932. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where he became enamored of flight at an early age. "When I was a boy, growing up during WW II," he said on the National Space Society's Web site, "I saw pictures of people flying aircraft, and I grew up near an airbase, so I wanted to be an aviator."

Bean began flight training when he was just 17 years old and still in high school, when he joined the Naval Air Rescue. He graduated from Paschal High School in Fort Worth, and...