Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell dies at 85

His death occurred on the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing, which took place on 5 February 1971. He served on the support crew for Apollo 9 and as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10 and played a key role in the lunar module simulator at the Johnson Space Center during Apollo 13, developing procedures that would bring the crew of that crippled spacecraft home.

Mitchell was in charge of piloting the Antares lunar module, which landed in the Fra Mauro region of the Moon. They spent over nine hours in collecting rocks, taking measurements and hitting a pair of golf balls.

“Suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft and the molecules in the body of my partners were prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generation of stars”, he said in an interview for “In the Shadow of the Moon”, a 2007 documentary.

The astronaut was born in Hereford, Texas in 1930.

He was 85 years old.

“What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness”, Mitchell wrote in his 1996 autobiography.

In later years he spoke of his belief that peace-loving aliens had visited Earth to prevent nuclear war between the USA and Soviet Union. He had a B.S.in Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon (1952), a B.S.in Aeronautics from the US Naval Postgraduate School (1961). and a Doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1964).

Apollo 14 was best known to the public because Shepard became the first and only golfer on the moon. 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).

With Mitchell’s demise, of the 12 men who have walked on the lunar surface, seven survive, viz. Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, John W. Young, Harrison Schmitt, David Scott, Charles Duke and Eugene Cernan. He founded a group called the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which sought to blend science with consciousness-raising, and in 1974, he published the book “Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science”.

Mitchell claimed the experiment was a success.

According to a news release from the family, Mitchell was a Navy test pilot from 1958-1972.

Their son, Adam Mitchell, died in 2010 at age 26. NASA agreed to display the camera at the National Air and Space Museum.