![]() In the Apollo years, NASA sent military test pilots into space, not poets or preachers they came back in possession of extraordinary knowledge that, by dint of personality or professional inclination, they seemed helpless to communicate. “It was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy,” he would later tell a yoga magazine. ![]() Nothing in his training had equipped him for a sudden discovery of the oneness of all things. Mitchell was a naval aviator whose doctoral dissertation, from M.I.T., was on guidance systems in low-thrust interplanetary vehicles. Looking out into space, Mitchell later recalled, “I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars.” As the Kitty Hawk command module hurtled homeward, Mitchell watched the earth, moon and sun passing by the window of the rotating capsule in two-minute intervals. It happened on the flight back from the moon, where Mitchell and his colleague Alan Shepard had traversed the Fra Mauro region and trekked to the Cone Crater to gather geological samples that, it was hoped, might reveal something of the moon’s inner structure. 9, 1971, and he has just had an epiphany. ![]() He is 40, with the receding hairline and blandly gentle affect of a family dentist. Mitchell, dressed in an olive-drab flight suit and a biological mask, steadies himself with his left hand on the door frame. A wetsuit-clad Navy swimmer is helping him out of the access hatch and into an inflatable raft. ![]() There is a photograph of the astronaut Edgar Mitchell emerging from the Apollo 14 capsule, a ragged cone of scorched metal and shredded foil bobbing in the South Pacific 880 miles off the coast of American Samoa. ![]()
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