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

Yes, we got frustrated with running out of time. We wanted to accomplish the mission. We knew they were doing their jobs, so it really wasn't frustrated with them as much as frustrated with the situation. And when they wanted to call it off, and both Alan and I were quite sure, the rim of cone crater was not far away, and I said, well, I can't remember exactly what the point was. The point was, we had to turn back, and I called them things. I said, you guys are bunch of things. We got to see the top. And they did give us a 30-minute extension at that point, and they knew that was coming. They could give us a 30-minute extension anyhow. So we got to go on up to the top a little bit more, unfortunately, so we got achieved our objective. The only objective was didn't get to look down into the crater, but as far as the location and the samples and the scientific objectives, they were all accomplished.

And now I just did, maybe it's an apocryphal story, but I understood that the rangefinder was left off because of weight, and what planet ever somebody made the decision to get that out of here. The rangefinder wasn't that good, and so it was left off because of weight. It just wasn't sophisticated enough for the task it had. As I recall, I mean, this had been a long time ago, and that decision was made, but we need something that was more like an electronic rangefinder, as opposed to an optical rangefinder. And it was too heavy to be carrying along and do what we needed. It turns out that the MET was really kind of top heavy in that reduced gravity, and so it bounced like a, from side to side in its center of gravity, was we were concerned it was going to turn over any time.

So we were just trying to carry it, stabilize it there. We had to slow down a little bit with regard just to the dynamics of motion dynamics of the MET. What was the better? The better. Well, as I recall, the DEC and the back-up crew didn't think we'd get to the MET, get the MET to the top, and with that back-up crew that we would, and it was a case of skies. And DEC saw struggling to get the thing up there, and could see the heart rate screwing up, and we were huffing it, puffing it, having trouble with navigation. And he said, OK, I'll cover the bed if you guys will drop it, drop the MET and go on to the top. But both of us felt we really needed our tools. We needed the sample bags and everything with us. So we elected just to pick it up and carry it, and which was the, which was really the MET, that it couldn't make it to the top, so we had to pick it up and carry it.

What was the result of the MET, though, finally, who ended up buying the scout? You know, I don't remember, I suspect DEC did, just like he said he did. I mean, he lived up to his words. I recall. I don't know if the geologist who bought him the scout? Yeah, and the final one else. It could be. It could be. I just don't remember that part of it. I don't know if I got any of that scotches, but I was at it. For you, talk to me personally about what effect the moon, that trip had on you. Did you have an epiphany on the moon? What was that about? Aside from the physical science and just the glory of exploration. The main event on me was to realize, upon the way home, what's the time to relax and reflect? Okay. Yes, I heard that. So you can do it secondically. All right. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Yeah. That's so good. I'm going to reflect and think about it having completed a successful mission and seeing Earth and the cosmos and the vast panoply of stars behind it, the galaxies, the galactic clusters and all that. And knowing from my studies how this all came about, at least our theories at that time, I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of that spacecraft were prototype and an ancient generation of stars. And instead of an intellectual idea, it suddenly became deeply personal, accompanied by a feeling, a feeling of, wow, this is a new idea. It's nothing new about it at all, but it suddenly took a different meaning. And it made me realize that a part of this was that this is an intelligent process we're looking at, not just classical science, of energy and particles being moved according

to the laws of physics. No, this is an intelligent process. And that our story about it, our cosmology, is told by science, was incomplete, flawed. And the cosmology of it is told by our cultural traditions, normally religious beliefs, or archaic and flawed. And that the day is then, as a space-faring civilization, we need a new story about ourselves. So who are we? How do we get here? What is this process? What is this really all about? And that our old stories simply were not adequate for us today. And that was accompanied by euphoria, by a wow and a ha, an ecstasy, that only later after research realized, was described in the ancient Sanskrit literature as a self-accompassimati experience, which means that you're observing the separateness of things, but experiencing the unity of things, accompanied by an ecstasy, and that the classic description of that is

a self-accompassimati in the Sanskrit. And it's a wow experience, and sufficiently so for me to change my life direction and set up, I realized that the problem between the scientific description of reality and the cultural, or mystical, or religious description of reality, hadn't knew what is the nature of the inner experience, and that meant what is the nature of consciousness? So that's been three years working on what is the nature of consciousness. And we've come up with a pretty good story, as understanding how it fits into our basic scientific world views, and it turns out the philosopher Renati Kart in the early 17th century, who said body and mind, the physicality and spirituality, are two separate realms of reality, simply not right.

It's a flawed conclusion. There are really two faces of the same reality, which is energy, and the energy we understand at that level is very well described by quantum physics and general relativity. When you were up there, you tried to experiment an extra-sensory perception, why were you trying to do it? How did it work? Do people know you were going to do it? Well, yeah, a few people knew I was going to do it. It was a very private personal experiment, I didn't expect for it to be, get out in any way. I did it because, again, I realized there were things about nature, remember? We were going into space. I was going into space to learn more about ourselves, how does nature work. And there was all sorts of evidence that our science was incomplete about these inner faculties, that the description was wrong.

I had only learned that a short time ago, but as I started reading the literature and finding that the literature was powerful in these psychic effects. And so I said, well, let's find out. They've done it here on Earth. Let's do our own little experiment in space to see if we could get anything. I mean, one little experiment didn't amount to much, but nevertheless it was intriguing. So I set up the experiment just to do it for myself. And yes, it worked, unfortunately. It was blown to the press by one of the participants who put a totally wrong slide on it. But the results were published, the results were significant to the point that just the preliminary results showed that our results could have been produced by chance one out of 3,000 experiments, which is very respectable results. Then when we analyzed it even further, we even learned more, when that was a post-flight

analysis instead of an a priori analysis, so you don't normally quote those. But the real results, when we once understood what was happening, was that the probability that the chance could have produced the results one out of 13,000 experiments, which is very darn good. Cut, second. Is the moon worth going back to, of course? We didn't get enough work done, we didn't understand enough of the science. We're still finding new things. Can we use it as a training ground for more distant explorations to other planets? Absolutely. Can we use it as a staging area? We can do that too. No, there's a lot more to be learned. And in due course, we will go back. I personally believe we probably need to get our act together a little better on Earth before we really tackle manned, deep space operations.

But there's a lot that can be done without doing that. Apollo, just as a quick ND statement. Was it a great project? Was it great for you? Apollo was a great project. For me and I think for everyone else. It broke us out of our provincialism for one thing. And I helped us see ourselves in a larger perspective. And Lord knows the way humanity has been poor stewards of planet Earth. We need to see ourselves in a larger perspective. And it's helped us do that. Cut. Great. Better work out. Take a look at it. And if we weren't in position, we'd have had to abort. If we weren't in position, there wouldn't be any question. We'll end it. Great. Okay. Cut for a second. We're getting camera sounds here. Yeah, just smack the mag. Yep. Spank it. That's good. That's it. I'll say that. I'll say that.

I'll say that. I'll say that. Yeah. I'll like the title. Tell us everybody. He really knew better than that. He forgot. He forgot. He forgot. I knew that that system, like the back of my hand. And I knew exactly when we were starting down that if we had to abort, I was ready to call the procedures. The first step was pitch over and take a look at where you are. He loved to tell that story, you know. Ed, you'll never know. But I actually asked that. That was his story. I know. I asked Chris Krap that story. And he said, you know, he said, he said, bullshit. He said, he said, you know, he wouldn't have had any choice. He would have had to abort it. We would have boarded him from the ground. Yeah. But you see, they couldn't. Oh, really? They couldn't. Once we disabled that circuit, we were on manual abort mode. Ground couldn't do a damn thing. The only thing we could do was pitch over and punch it off. And Chris didn't know the circuit that well either.

But I did the guys on the ground there. Yeah. It's a great view to the window to make sure you describe this slide, and I'll give you the navigation so you can actually line it. Could you make a verbal picture of that? I couldn't hear that. It's a little loud, Jeff. Well, I'm just going to go over the transcripts, and what you just said about line, what it looks like to the window, line it up through those double slide marks if you could give this kind of verbal picture of that. Well, Al had, in response to you before you'd go on, Al had the sighting class with the lines on it. I had lines, I had marks too, but he had a particular optical sight where he could tell how many blips to move the target area. Is that what you're talking about? I'm sure I'm having a little trouble here. It was interesting to, how you might navigate just by looking at it, you have a really

good look at the side of the window. Oh, okay. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. There we go. Sound down. Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay, Micah, we're rolling. Okay. Well, the question of how would we navigate, or how did we navigate once we pitched over and saw the lunar surface? Remember we had flown this profile in simulators, huh, were we going to be in a general area? The main concern was the altitude, would we be too high or too low due to this rough terrain? That's what the landing radar was for. To give us a sense of height, correct the computer for the actual terrain. So it was altitude above the surface, it was really our concern, and it turned out to

be right on, right on target. Okay. Great. Switching math. All right. Okay. Jeff, is that what you wanted? Yeah. Terrific. Micah. Micah, would you dial James, please, he's paged me twice. Mm-hmm. Obviously. Yeah.