Pete Conrad joined NASA as part of the second group of astronauts, known as the New Nine, on September 17, 1962. Regarded as one of the best pilots in the group, he was among the first of his group to be assigned a Gemini mission. As pilot of Gemini 5 he, along with his commander Gordon Cooper, set a new space endurance record of eight days. The duration of the Gemini 5 flight was actually 7 days 22 hours and 55 minutes, surpassing the then-current Russian record of five days. Eight days was the time required for the first manned lunar landing missions. Conrad facetiously referred to the Gemini 5 capsule as a flying garbage can. Pete Conrad tested many spacecraft systems essential to the Apollo program. He was also one of the smallest of the astronauts, 5 feet 6½ inches (1.69 meters) tall, so he found the confinement of the Gemini capsule less onerous than his Commander Gordon Cooper, who played American football, did. He was then named Commander of the Gemini 8 backup crew, and later Commander of Gemini 11 with pilot Richard Gordon. Gemini 11 docked with an Agena target vehicle immediately after achieving orbit. Such a maneuver was an engineering and flight test similar to what the Apollo Command Module (CM) and Lunar Module (LM) would later be required to do.

Pete Conrad was assigned in December 1966 to command the backup crew for the first Earth orbital test flight of the complete Apollo spacecraft, including the Lunar Module (LM) into low Earth orbit. Delays in the LM’s development pushed this mission to December 1968 as Apollo 8. But when one more delay occurred in readying the first LM for manned flight, NASA approved and scheduled a lunar orbit mission without the LM as Apollo 8, pushing Conrad’s backup mission to Apollo 9 in March 1969. Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton’s practice was to assign a backup crew as the prime crew on the third following mission. If the swap of 8 and 9 had not occurred, Conrad might have commanded Apollo 11, the first mission to land on the Moon. On November 14, 1969, Apollo 12 was launched with Conrad as Commander, Dick Gordon as Command Module Pilot, and Alan Bean as Lunar Module Pilot. The launch was the most harrowing of the Apollo program, as a series of lightning strikes just after liftoff temporarily knocked out power and guidance in the Command Module.

He later revealed that he said this in order to win a bet he had made with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for $500 to prove that NASA did not script astronaut comments (Fallaci was convinced that Armstrong’s “One small step for man” speech had been written for him and were not his own words). (In actuality, Conrad’s “long one” and Armstrong’s “small step” refer to two different actions: going from the ladder down to the landing pad, then stepping horizontally off the pad onto the lunar surface. Conrad’s words for stepping onto the Moon were “Oooh, is that soft and queasy.”) One of the photos that he took during the mission with his own image visible on the helmet visor of Al Bean was later listed on Popular Science’s photo gallery of the best astronaut selfies. Pete Conrad’s last mission was as Commander of Skylab 2, the first crew to board the Skylab space station. The station had been damaged on its unmanned launch, when its micrometeoroid shield tore away, taking one of two main solar panels with it and jamming the other one so that it could not deploy. Conrad and his crew repaired the damage on two spacewalks. Conrad managed to pull free the stuck solar panel by sheer brute force, an action of which he was particularly proud. The astronauts also erected a “parasol” solar shield to protect the station from intense solar heating, a function which the lost micrometeoroid shield was supposed to perform. Without the shield, Skylab and its contents would have become unusable. President Jimmy Carter honored Conrad for this in 1978 by awarding him the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Pete Conrad retired from NASA and the Navy in 1973, and went to work for American Television and Communications Company. He worked for McDonnell Douglas from 1976 into the 1990s. After an engine fell off a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 causing it to crash with the loss of all passengers and crew in 1979, Conrad spearheaded McDonnell Douglas’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to allay the fears of the public and policymakers, and save the plane’s reputation. During the 1990s he was the ground-based pilot for several test flights of the Delta Clipper experimental single stage to orbit launch vehicle. On February 14, 1996, Conrad was part of the crew on a record-breaking around-the-world flight in a Learjet owned by cable TV pioneer, Bill Daniels. The flight lasted 49 hours, 26 minutes and 8 seconds. Today the jet is on permanent static display at Denver International Airport’s Terminal C. In the last interview he gave before his death, Conrad sat down for PBS’s Nova series and discussed where he felt the future direction of space travel should go. He considered returning to the Moon “a waste of taxpayer money”, but recommended missions to Mars and asteroids. In 2006, NASA posthumously awarded him the Ambassador of Exploration Award for his work for the agency and science.

Pete Conrad died on July 8, 1999, less than three weeks before the 30th anniversary of the first Moon landing. While motorcycling from his home in Huntington Beach, to Monterey, California, with his wife and friends, his motorcycle crashed on a turn. Conrad later died in a hospital in Ojai, from internal injuries. He was wearing proper protective gear at the time and had been within a safe speed limit. He was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, with many Apollo-era astronauts in attendance.