CNN News reported that, Edgar Mitchell, one of just 12 human beings who walked on the moon, has died, according to his ex-wife, Anita Mitchell.
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Shepard and Mitchell were assigned to traverse the lunar surface to deploy scientific instruments and perform a communications test on the surface as well as photograph the lunar surface and any deep space phenomena. His death coincides with the 45th anniversary of his Apollo 14 mission.
The astronaut was born in Hereford, Texas in 1930.
He joined the Navy in 1952, and became an experience pilot. He opened a paranormal research center known as the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which studies extrasensory perception (ESP).
In a story he retold through the years, Mitchell described a moment during the return trip to Earth, as he gazed out the window of the spacecraft and saw the sun, moon, Earth and stars.
“Had we blown it, had it failed for whatever reason, that would probably have been the end of the Apollo program right there”, Mitchell said in 1997. Eventually, he launched with Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa on Apollo 14. But they were bumped to the next mission so Shepard would have more time to train.
He was the last living astronaut of the Apollo 14 mission.
Mitchell’s 1971 mission with two fellow astronauts, the third USA lunar landing, restored wavering public faith in NASA after the failure of Apollo 13.
In his book titled “The Way of the Explorer”, Mitchell wrote: “There was a sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental but that there was an intelligent process at work”. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you (censored). During the Depression, he moved to Artesia, N.M. While walking to school near Roswell, he would pass the home of Robert H. Goddard, whose early experiments in rocketry helped propel the country into space. On four occasions, he tried, with his mind, to convey the symbols on 25 randomly shuffled cards to four cohorts – two doctors and two psychics – back on Earth.
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In later years, he claimed the USA government covered up evidence that aliens had landed here. NASA agreed to display the camera at the National Air and Space Museum.
