Apollo 12 splashed down in the Pacific yesterday. Conrad, Gordon, and Bean are home safe and healthy. The mission lasted ten days.

The ledger: Conrad and Bean conducted two moonwalks totaling nearly eight hours. They set up the ALSEP — the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package — which will send seismic and other data back to Earth for years. They visited Surveyor 3 and brought back the camera and other pieces, which scientists will study in detail. They collected 75 pounds of lunar samples. Dick Gordon flew the Command Module alone in lunar orbit for 31.5 hours — one of the longest solo orbital flights in the program.

And the Moon landing itself: 200 meters from Surveyor 3. A precision landing that I don’t think gets enough credit in the newspapers, which are focused on the walking and the talking. The navigation alone is remarkable. You are going to land on the surface of another world, at night for the target spacecraft because the Sun is at the right angle only at certain times, within 200 meters of a specific three-legged tripod. And you did it.

Six men have walked on the Moon. Armstrong. Aldrin. Conrad. Bean. I say this several times a day because it still doesn’t feel real. Six people — six human beings — have stood on another world. Six sets of footprints in the regolith of the Moon. Six people who know, from direct personal experience, what it is like to be somewhere other than Earth.

What I keep thinking about: we are twelve weeks past the first landing and we have already done it twice. The second mission was harder in some ways (precision landing) and involved more science than the first. The program is learning. The program is building on itself. Each mission makes the next one more capable.

There are more missions coming. I’ve been reading about Apollo 13 — Fra Mauro, the fractured highland area formed by ejecta from the Mare Imbrium impact. Jim Lovell is going back. He was on Apollo 8 around the Moon. This time he gets to land. Or tries to. Everything has to work first.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now: six men have walked on the Moon. Two successful landings. One program that seems, against all odds and through all difficulties, to be working.

I walked outside last night. It’s cold now — November. The Moon was up, almost full, bright in the winter sky. Somewhere in that light — not the light of the Moon itself, which is just reflected sunlight, but that direction, that bearing — Pete Conrad said “Whoopee.”

I am very glad he did.