NASA astronaut Pete Conrad was the third man to walk on the moon. He was known as a guy who could fix anything… but he flunked out of high school because of his dyslexia.
Conrad is on the left
Conrad grew up in Pennsylvania and struggled with his schoolwork from a young age. In 11th grade, he failed most of his exams and was expelled from his private school. His mother refused to give up on his education and found a school in New York that used a different learning approach and would accept Conrad. He agreed to give it a try, and after only 2 years at the school, he had excelled so much that he gained a place at Princeton University on a Navy ROTC scholarship.
He’d always loved fixing things, and he became known in his teens as a talented tinkerer. When he was 16, he drove several hours away to help a flight instructor who had been forced to make an emergency landing. Conrad repaired the plane single-handedly. The instructor was so impressed that he agreed to help Conrad pass his pilot’s license test before graduating from high school!
After time as a fighter pilot in the US Navy, he was invited to join a NASA superteam of astronauts. Despite a rocky start, he was eventually selected for the Apollo 12 mission to the moon. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11, Conrad was the third man to step out of the spacecraft onto the lunar surface.
In an interview a few days later, he was quoted as joking: “Whoopie! That might have been a small [step] for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!”
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Sarah Forrest is a Literacy Specialist for the Easyread System, an online program for children with dyslexia, reading and spelling difficulties, auditory processing problems
and more. Get a free 10 lesson trial from www.oxfordlearningsolutions.com