In the showrooms, 2011 was the end of the line. The last car to have a standard-equipment cassette...
It was the year of Woodstock and once-in-a-lifetime music as different as Abbey Road and In a Silent Way. Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s UFO investigation, came to an end. A computer at UCLA was connected to another at Stanford, in an experiment that would eventually result in the World Wide Web as we know it today. The United States was on the way to the Moon, fulfilling the promise of President Kennedy not so many years prior. And for three of the astronauts involved in that project, it was also the year of the Astrovette.
Alan Bean didn’t start life as a “car guy”, being far more focused on his stellar career as a naval aviator, but who could blame him for catching the Corvette fever that was sweeping his fellow astronauts in the late sixties? Jim Rathmann, Chevrolet dealer and former Indy 500 winner, had cut a deal with General Motors to lease brand-new Corvettes to the country’s pre-eminent astronauts. The price was right, at just one dollar. Each lease was twelve months and out, at which point the astronauts would take delivery of another car from Rathmann’s inventory. Some cars got special paint or striping, all the better to mark them as astronaut specials.
For a few years, Bean drove whatever combination of color and equipment happened to capture his fancy – but when he joined Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon on the Apollo 12 mission, the three of them decided to special-order their cars, the only astronauts to do so. They also decided to all get the same thing. The spec sheet was a ‘Vette lover’s dream come true: the Turbo-Jet 427 big-block making 390hp, A/C, PosiTraction 3.08, four-speed manual. The color would be the new-for-1969 Riverside Gold, which would not return for 1970.
The three Corvettes were delivered to Jim Rathmann, who then arranged for them to be painted in a scheme designed by Tucker Torpedo stylist Alex Tremulis. Black “wings” covered the B-pillar and rear fenders in a scheme perhaps reminiscent of early combat jets. When the astronauts weren’t totally certain about the resulting look, Rathmann put a quarter-inch white stripe between the gold primary color and the black wings. Together, the cars were known as “Astrovettes”, which had been a generic description for the Rathmann program vehicles in the past but became attached specifically to these cars after their arrival.
Identical in specification, the three Astrovettes differed in one crucial area. Above the famous Stingray “gills” and the chrome script logo was a three-color plaque. Red, white, and blue. Pete Conrad’s car had “CDR” in the red square, denoting his status as mission commander. Dick Gordon, the command module pilot, had “CMP” in the white square. Finally, Bean had “LMP”, for lunar module pilot, in the blue square. The three astronauts enjoyed the cars and posed for numerous pictures together. Their mission, the second to land on the moon, ended successfully on November 24, 1969.
Little, if anything, is known about the whereabouts of Conrad’s and Gordon’s Astrovettes, but Bean’s car was luckier. Danny Reed, an Austin, Texas automotive enthusiast whose interest in space exploration had brought the Astrovettes to his attention, spotted it in a GMAC auction lot a year or so later. It was a sealed-bid process. The winning bid, for $13,000, wasn’t honored. Reed’s bid of $3,230, which represented all the cash he had, was in second place, a lucky $30 ahead of the third-place bidder. There was just one problem: he’d already spent the money on a boat. So, he took out a bank loan...
...and just like that, Danny Reed owned the Astro-Vette. Over the years, he drove it consistently but kept the odometer below 36,000 miles in total.
Shortly before the turn of the century, Reed hired Corvettes by Ray in Houston to restore the car. Ray Repczynski, the NCRS (National Corvette Restorers Society) pioneer who owned the shop, did it without removing the body from the frame, but it was nonetheless done very right. In the following decade, the Astrovette would win Top Flight, Duntov, and American Heritage Awards from the NCRS.
The Alan Bean car isn’t the only Astrovette Danny Reed has owned. He also found, and has partially restored, “standard” cars originally driven by Al Worden (command module pilot, Apollo 15) and Dave Scott (mission commander, Apollo 15). But it’s the gold-and-black car that has always drawn the most attention. It’s been in museums from coast to coast and has been displayed on the National Mall. Its value has been conservatively estimated at over a million dollars, making it one of the most valuable third-generation Corvettes to ever exist.
Danny Reed has made quite a reputation as a Corvette collector and connoisseur, but when it comes to the Astrovette he is explicit: “It will never belong to me. This will always be Alan Bean’s car.”
