“The one thing we missed was the Ben Franklin situation,” Petrone mused. “Somehow that had never entered into our discussion.” What they had done, they realized later, was to launch a 363-foot lightning rod, with the equivalent of a copper wire in the form of a trail of ionized gases running all the way down to the ground. Even though there was no lightning in the vicinity before launch, Apollo 12 could create its own. And that is exactly what it did, discharging the cloud into which it had entered.
