NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Edgar Dean "Ed" Mitchell, NASA astronaut who was Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 14, part 1 of 3

I'm just finishing my tour with the Navy, his test pilot, when that announcement by Kennedy was made and I was already in school to get advanced degrees and I just went right into my game plan. That's where I'm going, that's where I want to go. Did you ever thought about the moon before all that ever came up that you dream about the moon? Did you think God the moon? And that's some day I want to be able to do something. No, not really. My first indications came with Sputnik in 1957 when I was a test pilot aboard Carrier and said humans will be right behind robot craft, I want to be there and so I started shaping my career then, but when the announcement of the project go to the moon I knew that was the ultimate, that's what I wanted. Sputnik, what about Sputnik, where do you think about that when it happened? What thoughts went through your mind?

It was the beginning, it was the beginning, it would have never been above 60,000 feet in any craft at that point in time and I was pretty ambitious to get clear into orbit and I thought that was great. When you finally became an astronaut candidate and then finally went through the whole training, you were in the third group, how did you feel and what was the attitude about like getting rides? Did you feel like, hey, I'm in now, you're going to get a ride, I know there's a lot of competition to describe that to me. No, the first after being selected into the astronaut group was you need me to get paid for doing this and it was, to me, the height of discovery, exploration, find the unknown, go where humans haven't been before, discover and of course at that point, the Apollo program was already in planning, all it wasn't underway at that point, it was in planning them in

a manufacture and that was a dream to be one of those early crews. How tough was it to get a seat on one of those crews? Well, you'll have to ask the people who made the selection since our group was recruited particularly for the Apollo program. We seem to get seats pretty quickly, at least those of us who got seats pretty quickly. We did choose our technical assignment and I particularly chose the lunar module, ask for the lunar module as my technical assignment because I thought that would be an enhancement toward getting to the moon itself as and on the surface as a lunar module pilot. What about the lunar module? How much time did you spend learning that thing? What kind of an expert did you become? And Hayes and I were the primary astronaut, members of the astronaut corps, sent to Grumman as representatives of the crew.

So we virtually lived with the lunar module from the first test module right through Apollo 9, which was the first manned flown, manned module. And then Fred went on to back up Apollo 11, I backed up Apollo 10 and we were both working on the Apollo 9 crew at that point to bring the lunar module through its hoops and bring it to the launch pad. What did you think of the lunar module as a craft? At the, when we first saw the lunar module as a craft, it was ungainly. This is a flying machine, but of course you realize it had no need for aerodynamic capability or aerodynamic characteristics and no one was sure whether this thing would perform or even how it would perform in space, but it turned out to be a magnificent machine. It did its job well, it hung together well, it flew well and it was wonderful.

What were your impressions of the painted picture of the ungainliness to me? What did this thing look like to you when you first made eyes on it? Well I guess of the Apollo 9 crew who named the spider and the command module gumdrop to portray exactly what it looked like, it looked like an ungainly vehicle, it looked like a spider with these spindly legs hanging down and an angular mini-chasseted cabins and structure with mylar reflecting tissue all over it, it was quite a sight, I mean it didn't look like anything anybody'd ever seen as far as a flying machine was concerned. Great, let's just cut for a second, okay? Good, how do you guys feel about the introduction of scientists to the astronaut? Well I personally favored it, even though some of them were selected ahead of my group,

they went off to flight training and they were gone for a year or so off to flight training, but my group was there at that point and we had a couple of PhDs including myself in our group and I had dual qualifications test pilot and a doctorate, no I didn't feel threatened by that at all, yes, seats were the premiums, we were competing all the time who gets to fly first, Fred Hayes and Ken Maddingley and I in our group were always teasing each other about that and the one-upsmanship and the gotchas and the little tricks that we played on each other were continuously kind of oriented toward that, but as far as the scientists were concerned, I really thought we needed more science, I welcomed the science and I thought, for example, that the medical science, particularly the psychological science

was being neglected and so I welcomed that. Was that shared throughout the astronaut corps, did you hear rumblings? I don't believe there were rumblings, I think the general consensus of the individuals were, I'm going to give it my best shot and the chips will fall where they made, but I'm good, I'll be there and that's where most people saw it I think. I really didn't see that much competition or resentment of scientists at all, maybe I wasn't looking for it but I didn't see it. As time progressed, how was it you were assigned to 14, obviously not to 14 originally, but how were you hooked up with Al Shepard, what did you think when you got onto that crew? My history of getting into the pipeline I said, was to support crew on Apollo 9, back up crew on Apollo 10 and presumably that would lead to prime crew of Apollo 13.

Then when Gordon Cooper retired and was going to be replaced and Al and Shepard came on in his place, we were planning to be assigned to Apollo 13 and Al and did choose Stuart and I to be his crewmates and we expected to go with Apollo 13 and then the headquarters suggested that Alan should get a little more training time as a result of his inner air problem that he had suffered with for years and then had not been in the training group. It was announced that we would switch crews, which in levels crew, which none of us were particularly happy about at that moment but nevertheless that's the way it was and as it turned out of course they got our bad bird and we got a good one. Interestingly enough you ended up doing the assignment you would have done on 13. Exactly. We did get to do the assignment on Apollo 14 that we might have done on 13 or wouldn't

have done on 13 had we received that mission. Now at the time that Al got the crew and he picked you and Stuart, I've talked to Al about this great length, how are they characterizing the crew and were they giving you a hard time about that? No I don't think anyone was giving us a hard time, now Stu Russo was his in the imitable personality, he was oh man we got the greatest crew ever organized and he maintained that stance until his death, not only the greatest crew, the greatest mission, the greatest this and the greatest that, I mean Stuart was, that was his personality. Alan and I spent many, many hours as you all aware in the little module simulator and doing the geology training, Alan was a quick study, even though he hadn't been training and I had and Fred and Ken and I and Stu had all been training for a long time.

Alan came up to speak very very quickly, very capable, very bright and a good leader and so the crew coalesced very nicely and by the time we were ready to fly after the Apollo 13 mission there wasn't any question we were ready to go. He talked to me about Alan and geology a little bit, you know he always got kind of a bad rap that he wasn't that interested, he kind of pushed it off on you and said hey Ed take care of this, what was the real story about that? He and I talked about that truly for his death and I'm interested in your take on it. Alan was very capable, you know he didn't have all the interest in science, he didn't have the desire to understand the morphology which happened to be what I was really interested in, the morphology of the moon or the particular minerals but he was good at identifying them. In some cases he was better than I was at identifying him, he could spot some of the quicker. But even though that wasn't his prime interest, he did a very good job, he was capable, learned quickly, put himself to the task and only behind the scene did he grumble about it.

What kind of things did he say to you? Why, it was just clear, he didn't say anything particularly over, it was just you could tell, he'd rather be doing something instead of studying the details of science. Now talk to me a little bit about the field training that you got, okay perfect, good time to switch. Great. We'll see you in the film.