Ed Mitchell

Edgar Dean Mitchell was born on September 17, 1930, in Hereford, Texas, and raised in New Mexico near the White Sands proving grounds, where rocketry was in the air of his childhood. He pursued a formidable education, earning degrees in industrial management and aeronautical engineering before completing a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT in 1964. In parallel he built a career as a U.S. Navy aviator and research pilot, flying the A3D Skywarrior and accumulating some 5,000 flight hours, and he graduated first in his class from the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1966. That combination of scholar and aviator made him a natural selection for NASA's fifth astronaut group in 1966, and he was assigned as Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 14.

Apollo 14 lifted off on January 31, 1971, the first mission after Apollo 13's aborted flight and the first to reach the Fra Mauro highlands that Apollo 13 had been meant to explore. Mitchell descended in the lunar module Antares with commander Alan Shepard, and on February 5 he became the sixth person to walk on the Moon. Over two moonwalks totaling roughly nine hours, the pair hauled a wheeled equipment cart, deployed scientific instruments, and attempted the demanding uphill trek toward the rim of Cone Crater, gathering samples across the rugged terrain. It was Mitchell's only spaceflight, a nine-day mission of about 216 hours that placed him among the small fraternity of humans to have stood on another world.

The voyage changed Mitchell profoundly. On the coast back to Earth he experienced what he later described as an overwhelming sense of interconnected consciousness while gazing at the planet, and he conducted private, unsanctioned ESP experiments with collaborators on the ground. In 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to study consciousness and human potential through scientific inquiry, and he spent much of his later life as an outspoken advocate for such research, as well as for openness about unidentified aerial phenomena. Earlier, he had shared in the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to the Apollo 13 mission operations team for helping bring that stricken crew home. Edgar Mitchell died on February 4, 2016, in West Palm Beach, Florida, at the age of 85, remembered as an astronaut who turned a journey to the Moon into a lifelong search for the nature of the mind.