Did Andy Warhol leave a dick pic on the Moon via the Apollo 12 mission?
This might be one of the strangest threads I’ve ever done!

In the early sixties Forrest Myers had wanted to send his artwork to the Moon. He badgered NASA to give him an opportunity to send his work on one of their spacecrafts. NASA didn’t respond to his requests.

Myers took his idea, ‘Moon Museum’, to the E.A.T (Experiments in Art and Technology) where Robert Rauschenberg was one of its founders.
Rauschenberg like the idea and asked his friend at Bell Labs to produce 16 wafer thin ceramic disks the size of a postage stamp.

The discs contained the artwork of
Rauschenberg: Single line
Novros: Black box
Chamberlain: bottom left
Oldenburg: his signature which looked like Mickey Mouse
Myers: bottom right
Warhol: his initials which look like a penis

The person at Bell Labs, Fred Waldhauer, knew an engineer at Grumman who has access to the LM and could hid the artwork in or on the Lunar Module.

As “proof” that the ceramic tile was smuggled on the LM the Grumman engineer sent this telegram to Myers from the Cape. This is where I think the story starts to break down.

I kept wondering why send a the telegram just 2 days before the launch (12th November). That suggests that the tile was placed on the Lunar Module shortly before Conrad, Gordon and Bean went to the Moon.

Alarm bells ringing I started to think about the processing flow for the Saturn V at KSC. It generally took about 6 months to checkout, stack and test a Saturn V to get it ready for launch.
The Saturn V was rolled to pad 39A on 8th September. 2 months before the note was sent!

The FRR (Flight Readiness Review) was conducted on 30th September. This review basically locked in the launch date because the Saturn V and spacecrafts were signed off and ready for launch. In other words, you’d better have a damn good reason to get anywhere the vehicle.

A work order had to agreed, written up and signed off before someone was allowed access to the pad and vehicle. This is the work order to change work on Eagle’s landing gear.
No work order - no access.

About a month before launch the spacecrafts were loaded with hypergolic propellants. A hazardous operation which required training, clearance and took about a month. This procedure took the best part of 7 days to complete.

After this the space vehicle was essentially live and only permitted personal were allowed access to the pad and work areas. The 2 CDDTs were conducted at the end of October and gave the go for launch in mid November.

During this window only additional field tests or anomalies permitted a change or access to the vehicle.
For Apollo 12 a leak was detected in the LH2 tank in the service module and this tank was swapped out on 12th November.

Even so this swap did not give technicians access to the LM, which was stacked on top of the Spacecraft Launch Adaptor where the LM was protected.

One of the final procedures just a few hours before launch was to install the RTG element on the LM landing gear (it needed to be kept cool from air circulating via the Instrumentation Unit).

This RTG contained plutonium and I don’t think any Tom, Dick or Harry would be allowed to install it.
Which brings me back to the telegram sent from the Cape on 12th November.

This suggests the engineer had access to the LM just a few days before launch. He would’ve had more chance of gaining access into Fort Knox.

Sources for images: J Ward, A Contessa , J Pickering, J Bascom-Pipp, J Trachtman