Everyone has heard the story of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and how they flew their brittle, little spacecraft over a monochrome, boulder-strewn landscape - offering them nothing but a cold, hard death - until Armstrong breathlessly found a field of moondust wide enough set the Eagle down with just enough fuel left to let the watching world breath again.

That was Apollo 11.

Everyone has heard the story of Apollo 13 and how the three men, trapped aboard their shattered spacecraft, parried Death's descending blade a dozen times or more before falling into the warm, bosomy embrace of the South Pacific.

But few know of the extraordinary event which occurred during the flight between those two epic odysseys: Apollo 12.

It is a story which fills me with awe and grows not in the telling, but in the details.

The morning of November 14th, 1969 is breezy and cold. As the sun rises over the Florida Keys, its light edges upwards and over a Saturn V rocket standing on Platform 39A at Cape Canaveral. Steam rising lazily from the base of the huge machine and it sways back and forth as if tipped by a playful giant. The magnificent erection* stands ten meters across and one hundred meters high and the entire structure is throbbing with expectant propellant*.

Stuffed into the very top, like a day-old Prince Albert*, sit three American astronauts who want to go to the land of the Gods.

When there are no more reasons left to wait, that rocket rises from the Earth on five, ten-meter-long tongues of flame that literally rip the air in every direction for fifty miles. When Apollo 12 clears the tower, she rolls like a beast in the ocean, three million kilos of rumbling metal, before punching a perfect hole through the clouds. It was not just an extraordinary sight: it was a beautiful ride.

Moments later, there's a "BANG!" - a concussion - which ripples through the rocket. The air in the cabin fills with a burnt, metallic smell. A lurching heart-beat later, every single warning light on the console turns red and that strange, alarming odour is joined in the air by the sound of every alarm and klaxon ringing. Each man on board is gripped with a helpless fear that their fabulous rocket is about to explode.

Pete Conrad, the mission commander, whips his hand onto the abort lever. He is immediately ready to splash down several hundred million dollars-worth of hardware and American dreams into the Florida Straits while the whole world watches.

But they don't pick these men at random. Conrad waits. He gives those tiny mortals, rapidly disappearing below, a few seconds to try and figure out why he and his two colleagues might be about to die.

Down in Mission Control, there is nothing but a shocked silence as they stare at the snake-pit of signals from the stricken spacecraft. Even if the rocket doesn't explode, they can see that the three fuel cells are dead. Without the fuel-cells, there can be no life-support: by the time this rocket reaches orbit, in just a few minutes, it will be a tumbling sarcophagus for the three men on board. A spinning coffin, orbiting the Earth.

Everyone wants Pete Conrad to pull that lever…

…Everyone, but one man.

This man, sitting at the back of Mission Control is John Aaron. He's twenty-six years old. Some people know him as a mathematical genius. Others know him for the way his jet-black forelock falls over his forehead, unbidden. But everyone knows John Aaron as rocket nut. He is fanatical about everything to do with rockets and the Apollo Program is the reason he was born.

John Aaron is staring at this twisted telemetry and, somehow, incredibly, recognizes a tune.

"I know this." He says to himself. "I've seen this pattern before."

At this fateful moment, Apollo 12 is two miles up, doing 560 miles an hour and the jaws of disaster, tense and salivating, are ready snap closed around it. But John Aaron cannot help himself: he is thinking of a quirky, half-forgotten incident that happened over a year before.

But the memory is like a gossamer thread: his team had been conducting a systems integration test on the pad and … yes, there had been an electrical failure - his specialty - … a drop in the voltage… and then… every single warning light on the console had turned red… and all the alarms had started blaring. What did he do to fix it? What was it?

He frowns, wordless and unmoving. The rest of Mission Control stare at him. They are waiting for him to say: “Mission Abort.”

In agonizing increments, it comes back to him, the memory rising from the fog of time. He had traced the curious problem down to a tiny sub-system known as the the ‘S.C.E.’ - the Signal Conditioning Equipment. This obscure circuit controls the voltage which goes to the little bulbs and tiny speakers in the command console itself. It had been scrambled by the electrical problem.

John Aaron looks up. He is sitting in a room filled with peers who all believe that Apollo 12 has had its throat slit. But he makes one of the greatest educated guesses in History. He realizes something that nobody else yet knows: Maybe, passing through those clouds, Apollo 12 had been hit by lightning.

(Of course it was hit by lightning. The Gods are not jealous of our mortality. But they are deeply jealous of the adventure it bestows upon us. We can be fearless and courageous in a way that an immortal God can never be. They writhe with envy over this. Of course it was hit by lightning.)

John Arron takes the deepest breath of his life. The entire room is watching him.

"Try S.C.E. to AUX."

"What?" Says the flight controller, frowning. "FCE?"

"No 'S' for 'Sierra': S.C.E."

None of the engineers knew what he was talking about; nobody in mission control had ever heard of this switch. Sickening confusion descends upon the men in Mission Control. The God of Chaos laughs and reigns.

Meanwhile, Pete Conrad is two miles up, doing five hundred and ninety miles an hour. He is calling out the nonsense values on all the gauges before him, raising his voice over the klaxons, shouting over the open mike. He has no intention of pulling that abort lever. He’s ready to die a test pilot.

Then he hears it: "Apollo, we want you to switch S.C.E. to AUX."

"Say again?"

"Try S.C.E. to AUX."

Conrad cannot believe it; he has no clue what that is!

"What the hell is that?" He shouts. He turns to the man on his left. "Do you know what they're talking about?"

Richard Gordon is the Command Module pilot. He is frantically scanning the panels trying to find this switch. He's never heard of it either.

And that's it. Conrad is out of time. He has to abort now.

But allow History to hold her breath for a moment longer and ask: what's the third astronaut doing at this fateful moment?

The man sitting to Conrad's right is Alan Lavern Bean. He's been throwing jet-fighters on and off aircraft carriers for seventeen years. He's the Lunar Pilot: it will be his job to navigate the distant ‘Ocean of Storms’, on the Moon. Bean has nothing to do during the launch itself except sit there with his arms crossed, weigh one hundred and sixty kilograms and hope for the best. How could he possibly know where this switch is, when all others have failed?

For five months, he has sat there during:

every test

every simulation

every practice launch

every rehearsal

He has sat there, and done nothing but stare straight ahead at a row of switches on the command console. The one on the end reads 'SCE/AUX'.

(During those long months, he grew curious about that particular switch, purely because it was never mentioned, never called-upon, forgotten and unused. One evening, he raised his hand and he asked the engineers: "Boys, what does that S.C.E. switch do?" And none of the engineers had known. So the following morning, he had gone down to the training centre and found the S.C.E. manual and stole it and took it home and read the bloody thing: just to satisfy his own curiosity.)

Bean is now two miles up, doing nearly six hundred miles an hour, his rocket is about to kill him in half-a-dozen different ways and someone has just said "Try ‘S.C.E.’ to ‘AUX’."

So while it's being debated by everyone else, Alan Lavern Bean squeezes his throat-mike and – IN A TRANCE OF DISBELIEF - says: "Roger, switching S.C.E. to AUX."

He lifts his gloved finger and flips that switch. He spits in the face of the Gods.

What happens next is one of the most celebrated moments in space-flight history. All the warning lights turn green. All the alarms and klaxons fall silent. The S.C.E. has switched to its ‘aux’ - auxiliary - circuit, a fresh battery, and it can no longer find anything wrong with this magnificent penis* machine.

Gordon restarts the fuel-cells in flight. Their gimbals are still on the money. Apollo 12 roars on into orbit, unstoppable now, her five gigantic engines almost drowning out the sound of Pete Conrad cackling over the radio.

Apollo 12 went to the Moon. They left their boot-prints all over the face of a God and returned to Earth safely and Apollo 12 is now held up as one of the most 'glitch-free' missions of the entire Apollo program.

And what, dear reader, of young John Arron, who sat down there at the back of mission control and saved the day?

He is celebrated, to this day, at NASA and, indeed, here in this story, as the greatest, steely-eyed missile-man who ever lived.

The End

*This is the Apollo Program; it was run by a bunch of white guys. Please expect copious, unavoidable phallic symbolism.