Washington: Edgar D. Mitchell, who became the sixth man to walk on the moon as a member of Nasa’s first lunar mission devoted exclusively to scientific research, died Thursday at a hospice in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was 85.
Nasa announced his death, which came one day before the 45th anniversary of his moon landing.
The Apollo 14 flight, launched on January 31, 1971, took Mitchell and his fellow Navy officer, Alan B. Shepard junior, to the moon’s Fra Mauro highlands. Shepard had been America’s first man in space 10 years earlier.
Stuart A. Roosa of the Air Force remained in orbit snapping photographs of potential sites for future missions while awaiting his colleagues’ return in the lunar module.
The first two flights to the moon — the epic Apollo 11 of July 1969 with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 12 four months later — were largely devoted to testing whether men could survive there, albeit it for brief periods. Apollo 13’s scheduled moon landing had been aborted by a near-disastrous oxygen tank explosion.
For Apollo 14, scientists were counting on Mitchell and Shepard to be the first astronauts to return with a large collections of rocks from high elevations, where some might be old enough to provide clues to the moon’s origin and its evolution. (Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 had landed in fairly level areas.)
Spending just over nine hours on two moonwalks, the astronauts collected more than 94 pounds of rocks, piling them in a two-wheeled cart they were hauling. But they missed out on completing one important task.
Nasa had hoped that they could climb to the rim of the nearly 400-foot-high Cone crater and collect especially significant rock samples there. But in lugging the cart the astronauts found the climb to be difficult and experienced rapid heartbeats. Mission control, concerned about exhaustion and wary of time constraints, ordered them to turn back. Unbeknown to the men at the time, they were only about 20 yards from their goal.
Mitchell, who had a doctorate in flight sciences, had long maintained a parallel interest in the study of consciousness, a fascination that was heightened during his return from the moon.
“It was a sense of the Earth being in critical condition, a recognition of the massive insanity which had led man into deeper and deeper crises on the planet,” he told writer Francine du Plessix Gray in The New York Times Magazine in August 1974.
“Above all, I felt the need for a radical change in our culture. I knew we were replete with untapped intuitive and psychic forces which we must utilise if we were to survive, forces that Western society had programmed us to disregard.”
Heading home, Mitchell secretly conducted an experiment in extrasensory perception — thought transference — while his fellow astronauts were asleep. He concentrated on symbols in a set of cards he had brought with him in the hope that four people he had selected back on Earth could read his thoughts and determine what those drawings were.
In discussing the experiment at a news conference five months later, he said it produced “results far exceeding anything expected.” Of the 200 guesses by his contacts back on Earth, he said, 51 correctly identified his thoughts.
Another Apollo 14 moment having nothing to do with rocks was provided by Shepard, who took three golf balls with him to the moon.
Wielding a makeshift 6-iron, he hit a shot, televised back to Earth, that travelled “miles and miles and miles,” as he put it, in lunar gravity only one-sixth that of the Earth. (The shot was presumed to have gone more than 800 feet, more than six times his normal range with a 6-iron back on Earth.)
Edgar Dean Mitchell was born September 19, 1930, in Hereford, Texas, and grew up in Artesia, New Mexico. He became fascinated by flight when he watched crop duster pilots flying biplanes from an airfield near his home.
He received a bachelor of science degree in industrial management from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh in 1952 and joined the Navy the next year.
After flying fighter planes, he obtained another bachelor’s degree, in aeronautics, from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1961. He earned his doctorate, in aeronautics and astronautics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. He graduated from test pilot school, then joined the astronaut corps in April 1966.
Apollo 14 was Mitchell’s only space flight. He retired from Nasa and the Navy in 1972 and at his death lived in Lake Worth, Florida, south of West Palm Beach.
Mitchell’s two marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include four daughters, Karlyn, Elizabeth, Mary and Kimberly, and a son, Paul, according to the South Florida website TCPalm.com. Kimberly Mitchell is a former city commissioner of West Palm Beach.
Mitchell owned a business consulting firm in South Florida but retained his interest in studying the mind.
In 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a California-based non-profit that supports research in the field. Its name is derived from the Greek word variously defined as intellect or inner wisdom.
Mitchell created a stir in 2008 when he told a British radio station that his contacts in military and intelligence circles had told him that “we’ve been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomena is real,” but that governments had “covered up” the matter for at least 60 years. (His boyhood home was 40 miles south of Roswell, New Mexico, site of the celebrated claim of an unidentified flying object crash and government cover-up in 1947.)
Nasa, Mitchell’s former employer, was quick to respond.
“Nasa does not track UFOs,” a spokesman for the agency said. “Nasa is not involved in any sort of cover-up about alien life on this planet or anywhere else in the universe.”
