The third man to walk on the Moon ad-libbed his first words to win a $500 bet!

You probably know it was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin who walked on the moon first. For whatever reason, history has a way of forgetting they weren’t the only ones to walk on the moon. After Apollo 11 came more missions, including Apollo 12, where the next men walked on the moon.

Among these was Pete Conrad, the third man on the moon. On November 14, 1969, Apollo 12 took off with Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean. Although the crew almost never made it due to lightning strikes following the takeoff, they thankfully made it.

When Conrad stepped out onto the ladder of the spacecraft, he said “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.” After the fact, he revealed that he said those words to win a bet he had made with an Italian journalist who thought NASA had scripted astronaut comments.

Conrad spoke the words when he stepped onto the ladder, but his first words once stepping on the moon were “Ooh, that is soft and queasy.”

(Source)