“Since I was a teenager, the two great bodies of theory that I respected seemed to be at odds. “I’ve been always poking into the unquestioned questions,” he says. He’ll smoke a pack of cigarettes in an hour.”Īs an astronaut, Mitchell thought of himself as a scientist and pilot, but from an early age he had a yearning for something else. “When I think of him,” says his stepson, Paul, “I see him with his eyes so bloodshot from smoke, it’s almost as if his eyes get red from thinking too hard. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night to jot down an idea for another turn of the cube. When Rubik’s Cube came out, he would study it for 45 minutes at a time without making a move and would then record every twist in a notebook. Mitchell.” He is intensely serious and cerebral. With a doctorate from MIT and three honorary Ph.D.s, he likes to be called “Dr. The experiments did not endear him to his fellow astronauts, but he adds, “You’d be surprised at how many engineers and astronauts sneaked furtively into my office to ask about it.”ĮDGAR MITCHELL IS NOT the kind of man who takes life lightly. Mitchell claims that the figures are “statistically significant” because, with such a low percentage, some force other than chance had to be at work. In about 300 attempts, they got only 35 right. He had taken a set of cards with him, and at prescribed times during the flight he concentrated on the printed shapes while psychics on Earth tried to pick up his mental signals. “That was what you prided yourself on - handling an emergency.”īut Mitchell’s lunar mission turned out to be something more than just a nerves-of-steel test flight. “There were always close calls,” Mitchell says. In the old days he had trained under Chuck Yeager, the most legendary test pilot of them all. It was the ultimate seat-of-the-pants flight.īut then, Ed Mitchell always has liked a challenge. Shepard took the controls and flew the Antares by hand, while Mitchell regained contact with Mission Control and spent two hours reprogramming the electronics. Communication with Earth was temporatily blocked because they were on the dark side of the moon. Mitchell was the pilot of the lunar module, Antares, and with less than one orbit to go before he and Shepard were to bring the craft down on the moon, the ship’s computer and radar went dead. It was a year and a half after Neil Armstrong had taken his giant leap for mankind. 9, 1971, as part of the Apollo 14 crew, with Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa. MITCHELL MADE HIS FLIGHT INTO space from Jan. “He’s the damnedest study of the human psyche you’ll ever come across,” says his former wife, Anita. My only saving grace is that I’m a totally open person. “The travails of the last four years have been a very deepening spiritual experience,” he says. If Edgar Mitchell left his footprints on the moon as an American hero, he has since become the man who fell to Earth.
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