Bunnies on the Moon: The Playmates Who Went to the Moon in 1969

The documentation that astronauts had access to during their flights in the Apollo program was undoubtedly one of the most critical resources for ensuring the overall success of the missions. But the truth is that many people worked on those texts, and sometimes they made a little room to incorporate jokes or hand-drawn doodles.

In the case of Apollo 12, the astronauts were accompanied by images of five playmates who were part of the famous Playboy magazine between 1967 and 1969, and they didn't realize it until they reached the Moon.

Imagine for a moment the level of tension. Besides risking their lives in the unforgiving hostility of deep space, the Apollo 12 astronauts needed everything to go well after Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin returned home as national heroes. The supremacy of the American space program over Soviet technology had to be confirmed, and so they launched toward the Moon on November 14, 1969.

Five days later they landed in the Ocean of Storms, a region that had also been visited by the Surveyor 1 and 3 probes (in fact, the crew managed to recover several components of Surveyor 3, including the camera), and approximately two and a half hours after starting their extravehicular activity, the astronauts found something very special in their documentation.

Playboy Playmates on the Moon

That's right: Playmates! The documents were not exclusively accessible to the astronauts, and that allowed various ground personnel to add small details ranging from drawings to jokes, along with their signatures and other messages.

The young women were accompanied by phrases suggesting specific scientific activities such as “Examine - Your Activity”, “Describe the Protrusions”, “Preferred Link Companion”, and “Have You Seen Any Interesting Valleys and Hills?”.

Mission commander Charles Conrad insisted that he “had no idea” that the playmate photos had traveled with them, but he acknowledged that this kind of joke was common, and probably extended back to the Mercury program.

According to Conrad, it was Dave Scott (backup commander for Apollo 12) who first added jokes to the documentation. The astronauts tried not to say anything over open communication so that the people in Houston wouldn't get upset, but they couldn't help but burst out laughing.

This special moment was recreated in the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon from 1998 (produced by Tom Hanks), although with a slight technical error: Alan Bean looks at the playmate that Conrad actually had, and vice versa.

That brings us to the order of appearance. Conrad and Bean each had two playmates in their documents. On Conrad's side we find Angela Dorian, Miss September 1967, and Reagan Wilson, Miss October 1967. In Bean's documents we see Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968, and Leslie Bianchini, Miss January 1969.

But there's more: those playmates weren't the only ones on the mission. In the Apollo 12 command module (Richard Gordon was aboard), a 1969 calendar also featured DeDe Lind, who was Miss August 1967. This item ended up being auctioned in 2011 for an undisclosed sum, but Gordon himself certified its authenticity.

(Editor's note: The 'unedited'/'NSFW' versions are available by clicking on the images, except in the case of DeDe Lind.)

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