Apollo 12 Hit by Lightning Twice in 52 Seconds — Then
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- Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice within the first 52 seconds of flight, filling the spacecraft with warning lights and scrambling Mission Control's data displays into nonsense.
- John Aaron, a young controller on duty, recognized an obscure failure pattern from the scrambled telemetry and called the correct switch reset that cleared the cockpit and restored the mission.
Why it matters: Aaron's quick recognition of a telemetry pattern nobody else recognized turned a potentially mission-ending electrical fault into a recoverable anomaly, preserving Apollo 12's November 1969 lunar landing — a textbook case of single-expert judgment beating the data on the screens.
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