When America Went to the Moon
The cold war inspired it, big bucks backed it and Yankee ingenuity made it happen; 25 years later, the footprints in the lunar dust still inspire awe
EDGAR MITCHELL APOLLO 14, 1971 Edgar Mitchell could never reconcile his two worlds. He was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household but studied science and engineering in college. Then, on the long flight back to Earth aboard Apollo 14, he had what he calls an "insight." As he peered at the Earth from across the vastness of space, he realized that the universe was neither the grinding machine described by Newton nor predetermined by God. In that moment, he knew, "I was not separate from the universe. It's a part of me."
For Mitchell, nothing has looked quite the same since. He has spent the last 23 years trying to piece together what happened to him then, to understand the nature of human consciousness and spirituality. Following splashdown, he divorced, left NASA and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a branch of parapsychology. He also created a stir by admitting that he'd conducted secret ESP experiments in space. As his lunar excursion module dived toward the moon, Mitchell placed symbols against a table of random numbers, while four associates on Earth tried to guess the orderings (they guessed 51 out of 200 right). Today, Mitchell, 63, believes that audiences are more receptive to his ideas: "It's much more accepted," he says, "that we live in a holistic universe, that everything is connected."
DAVID SCOTT APOLLO 15, 1971 Children explore from the minute they crawl," says David Scott. "They may bump their heads, but they explore." As commander of Apollo 15, Scott, who also flew on Gemini 8 and Apollo 9, knows a thing or two about exploring. But he also bumped his head in an embarrassing post-splashdown scandal.
Under Scott, a new era of lunar exploration got underway with the moon rover, a four-wheel vehicle designed by Boeing and General Motors. The television networks, which had all but ignored the mission because of declining ratings, switched to dramatic live coverage of Scott cruising across lunar boulder fields--and NASA got a sorely needed PR boost.
Then came the PR nightmare. News that the Apollo 15 crew had taken 398 unauthorized first-edition postage-stamp envelope covers on their flight--to be sold later--scandalized the astronaut corps. Scott says he did nothing wrong, that his crew simply forgot to enter the covers in the log. Nevertheless, Scott was summarily dropped from the astronaut corps and reassigned to a technical assistant's post. His bad luck has continued. The business he started designing satellite launch systems for space shuttles lost millions after the Challenger disaster; recently, he was sued for fraud. But Scott, 60, remains philosophical. "I've had bad breaks, but it all balances out," he says. "I had the best flight of the Apollo program."
HARRISON SCHMITT APOLLO 17, 1972 Glimpsed from the moon, Earth struck almost every astronaut as fragile and vulnerable. But Harrison Schmitt looked at the shimmering blue planet 240,000 miles away with the detached gaze of a scientist. What he saw was not fragility but majestic power and strength. "As a geologist, I'd been thinking about the Earth as a whole body in space throughout my career, so seeing it there wasn't a surprise," he recalls. "It's a very sturdy place."
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