Just as boys in the late 19th century had a fascination with the cowboys blazing trails in the American West, many of us growing up during the decade of the 1960s found our heroes in the astronauts conquering the frontiers of space.

A spirit of adventure led our first space pioneers — the Mercury Seven — to pilot the manned spaceflights of the Mercury program from May 1961 to 1963.

They also inspired the Apollo moon mission astronauts like Alan Bean, who passed away last weekend in Houston at the age of 86. A youngster growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, during the Depression years, Bean was fascinated by model planes and aviators.

Pursuing his dreams, he became a pilot and was so good that NASA selected him for the space program. At age 37, Bean made his first flight into space aboard Apollo 12, the second manned mission to land on the Moon. In November 1969, he became the fourth of 12 people to walk on the lunar surface.

Bean was admired and respected not only as an astronaut but as an accomplished artist. After retiring from NASA in 1981, he said he realized there were young men and women who could fly the shuttle as good or better than he could. This freed him to pursue his other lifelong interest — painting.

Bean’s art captured the American spirit in space travel, especially with the Apollo program astronauts.

His accuracy and detail came through personal experience. Bean logged 69 days, 15 hours and 45 minutes in space — including 31 hours and 31 minutes on the moon’s surface. In his 18 years as an astronaut, he was fortunate to see sights no other artist had ever viewed firsthand.

Along with the personal experiences, he gives his art a special touch of realism. Tiny pieces of the patches from his spacesuit were embedded into the paintings, along with small amounts of lunar dust.

To add texture to his paintings, he also used the hammer used to pound the flagpole into the lunar surface, and a bronzed moon boot.

Bean once said he felt blessed every day that he spent working on his paintings.

One of his paintings, titled “We Came in Peace for All Mankind,” is a good example. The work is a tribute to his good friend and Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin, who is shown kneeling in prayer in front of the lunar rover first driven during the moon landing on July 30, 1971.

Irwin later stated that he was aware that thousands of people on Earth were praying for the success of his mission. He said the hours he spent on the moon were the most thrilling of his life because he could feel the presence of God and realized that astronauts could only visit the heavens with the help of a higher power.

Another one of Bean’s paintings — “Reaching for the Stars” — shows a universal astronaut carrying a torch through space. It symbolizes the astronauts who flew in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions.

Included in that select group is Bean himself, an American original who not walked on the moon as an astronaut but also gave us a personal perspective of the space triumphs through his paintings.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com