Mitchell related to Wilkins because Wilkins was a voyager of the first order, one of the world’s most famous explorers of the modern era. He was a larger-than-life individual whose daring feats commanded respect wherever he went. In 1926 he became the first man to fly from North America to the polar regions of Europe, proving there was no continent under the Arctic ice. He led multiple expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, and in 1931 attempted to reach the North Pole in a surplus World War I submarine. After his death in November 1958 the U.S. Navy took his ashes to the North Pole aboard the nuclear submarine USS Skate and scattered them in the majestic Arctic as the great explorer had requested.
Now, as Ed Mitchell prepared for his Moon voyage, his interest in extrasensory perception grew. All his life he’d been a rule follower, a naval officer and an aviator, a test pilot and an aeronautical engineer. But then, in 1961, while getting his PhD in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began studying topics that expanded and altered his worldview, including quantum mechanics, galactic evolution, and star evolution. “These were abstruse subjects,” Mitchell later recalled. “No one knew the answers to the questions they posed.” Studying these concepts, he found himself increasingly interested in what science had not yet figured out. “I would lie awake at night wondering about the meaning of life and man’s place in the universe,” Mitchell recalled. Selected for astronaut training, he began practicing meditation and yoga. “Meditation produces qualitative and beneficial shifts in psychophysiological conditions,” he said. And as he prepared for the voyage into outer space, he started to contemplate the meaning of inner space, or human consciousness. What does consciousness mean? And how do outer space and inner space align?
At 4:02 in the afternoon of January 31, 1971, there was no more time to wonder what it would be like in outer space. Apollo 14 was minutes from launch, and Ed Mitchell braced himself for what was about to unfold. Here on a tiny spit of land off the coast of Florida, Ed Mitchell, Alan Shepard, and Stuart Roosa were about to leave planet Earth. The clock was ticking, and from a technical standpoint the danger on board this rocket ship was rising. Training helps an astronaut master extraordinary human functioning: an unusual degree of control over what transpires within his or her body. At any given moment in space a myriad things can go wrong, and to exist in this state for an extended period of time requires immediate focus and attention. “We’d spent ten percent of our time studying plans for the mission and ninety percent learning how to react intuitively to all the ‘what ifs,’” Mitchell later recalled.
To prepare for space travel and for landing on the Moon, the Apollo astronauts cultivated extraordinary human functioning, Mitchell says. They learned to develop intention techniques. To get to the Moon and back, they would have to function in an extremely hostile environment for more than 200 consecutive hours, on very little sleep. Whereas another man’s adrenaline might spike to dangerous levels, astronauts trained their minds to keep their bodies calm. This is not something that can be faked. Every breath and every heartbeat of each of the Apollo astronauts would be monitored by aerospace doctors on the ground, in real time. “The mind has to convince the body all is well. Through training, this can be done,” Mitchell said. On land, they had rehearsed for every contingency they could face on the mission, including how to withstand g-forces, how to maneuver in zero-gravity conditions, and how to scale craters and climb hills in environments that mimicked the Moon’s.
It was now just a few minutes to blastoff and Ed Mitchell sat buckled into a small seat inside the cone-shaped spaceship, attached near the top of the Saturn V rocket. The rocket was taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighed 6.2 million pounds. It was in this quiet moment anticipating blast and fury that Mitchell accepted there was nothing for him to do but sit still. Here was the moment when “the mind [could be] called upon to keep the body calm,” Mitchell recalled in 2015. The scientist in him knew that inside the lower portion of the rocket there were more than 66,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen fuel. In a matter of seconds a small pyrotechnic device would deliver a spark, ignite the fuel, and cause the massive explosion necessary to generate thrust. If everything went right, the three men would be on their way to the Moon. If anything went wrong, they would die instantly, in an inferno. Twenty seconds passed. There were now fifty seconds to go. The upper-access arms connecting the space capsule to the scaffolding released and swung away.
“Initiate firing command,” boomed a voice. NASA computers took charge.
Inside the space capsule Ed Mitchell listened to the rushing sounds of liquid as thousands of gallons of propellants sped through the rocket’s fuel lines. He could hear the turbo pumps spinning as the countdown continued. “Ten… nine… eight.” Kerosene and liquid oxygen hurtled into the combustion chambers of the first-stage engine of the Saturn V. Next came ignition, then fire and flames. Pad 39A trembled in an explosion of fuel. Computers indicated to NASA technicians that there was sufficient power to launch. The clock reached 0 and the rocket’s massive hold-down arms fell away. Apollo 14 lifted off the launch pad, headed for the Moon.
The Moon. Earth’s only natural satellite. A subject of mystery and mysticism since the dawn of recorded history. The Moon is thought to have formed some 4.5 billion years ago, its origins inextricably linked to the earliest evolution of Earth. The Apollo 14 voyage to the Moon was for NASA a pivotal moment in its attempt to understand these origins. This was the first lunar landing mission to focus on science and geology rather than space-travel techniques. Ed Mitchell and Alan Shepard would collect rock samples from a meteor impact site called Cone Crater and bring these samples home. Geologists believed that this data could provide a view of the ancient aftermath of the cataclysmic impact believed to have left debris across the Moon’s surface one billion years before.
Hours passed. Time and motion took on an exceptional dimension, Mitchell later recalled. As Apollo 14 made its way to the Moon, the spacecraft rotated slowly so the side facing the sun wouldn’t get too hot. Mitchell closed his eyes and experienced the sensation of standing still. He took a pen from his bag and released it, then marveled as it floated through the air in front of him. Out here in space there appeared to be no up or down. He reached for the telescope and used it to look out the window at the stars. In 1595, the microscope opened up the world of small-scale science, of biology. Thirteen years later, in 1608, the telescope opened up wide-scale science, the world of cosmology. What twentieth-century instrument would open up the study of consciousness, Ed Mitchell wondered, the unsolved mystery that is the human mind?
The Apollo 14 astronauts ate their freeze-dried dinner, went to the bathroom, and brushed their teeth. Now it was time to sleep. Each astronaut pulled down his nearest window shade(s) to shut out the bright light of the sun. Each was allowed to bring along personal reading material and music to help him fall asleep. After some minutes of quiet time, the schedule indicated lights-out.
“I did not intend to fall asleep immediately,” Ed Mitchell recalled in 2015. He had an alternative plan in place. He was going to conduct a secret experiment that had been arranged with three civilian colleagues back on Earth, two physicians and a Swedish-born psychic named Olaf Johnson. Just as Sir Hubert Wilkins had done three decades before, Ed Mitchell intended to conduct a long-distance mind-to-mind telepathy experiment right here in outer space. Mitchell would act as the sender, Olaf Johnson as the receiver. Two of Mitchell’s physician friends, Edward Maxey and Edward Boyle, would act as witnesses, sitting with Johnson in his Chicago apartment. Doctors Maxey and Boyle had helped train Mitchell in extraordinary human functioning techniques by teaching him advanced scuba diving techniques.
Mitchell reached into his bag and pulled out a clipboard and a secret set of five Zener cards, now a staple in modern ESP experiments. On each card was a symbol: circle, square, star, cross, three wavy lines. He flipped the cards over so he couldn’t see the symbols, then shuffled the deck. He chose a card at random a
nd turned it over. Staring at the symbol, he concentrated for fifteen seconds. With his pen, he noted on his clipboard the precise time it was on Earth and the symbol he’d been staring at. He repeated this effort twenty-five times, each time with a new Zener card randomly chosen from the five. The process took approximately seven minutes. When he finished, he put his things away and went to sleep.
Eighty hours passed. Edgar Mitchell grew a beard. He longed for a bath and a slice of his mother’s apple pie. From one of the craft’s five windows, he looked back and forth between the Moon’s mysterious surface and a map in his hands. Men have been making maps of the Moon since the days of cuneiform writing. This particular map had been made by NASA and was the product of data collected on previous flights. Ed Mitchell was an expert navigator and map reader, and it was his job to take this map with him when he and Shepard got to the surface of the Moon.
“The Moon looks huge,” he told Houston control. Their target, Cone Crater, was getting closer. Almost visible now. Mitchell could see the upper end of the Sea of Fertility and noted how much darker it was than everything around it. “There’s Theophilus,” he told Houston. “The craters look fresh. Vivid.” He saw the Descartes site. The Albategnius Crater. Herschel’s west wall. He marveled at the long shadows and the rugged landscape. Finally, he located the eastern edge of Fra Mauro, their designated landing site. Remarkably, as long as everything went according to schedule, their destination was just a few hours away.
The Kitty Hawk command module was orbiting the Moon now, at an altitude of roughly ten miles. “This scale is so deceiving,” Mitchell said. “We could be five hundred feet in the air, the way this terrain looks,” he told NASA. “Tracking the landmarks is rather phenomenal.”
After ten rotations around the Moon, it was undocking time for the Antares lander. Mitchell and Alan Shepard prepared for their landing; Stu Roosa would remain inside Kitty Hawk, in orbit for two days until rendezvous and the return journey back to Earth. Mitchell and Shepard readied themselves, then squeezed down into the tunnel that connected the command module to Antares. A deep breath. A leap of faith. Ready, set, go. Shepard opened the hatch. Out they went, and into the lunar module. Antares was their lifeline to the Moon and back.
Before their final descent to the surface, Shepard and Mitchell were required to fly the lunar module around the backside of the Moon two more times. Each orbit took between ninety minutes and two hours. Mitchell felt an incredible psychological tension in the lunar module, he said, and he wondered whether his fellow astronauts had felt this strain too. He looked at the map of the Fra Mauro landing site and compared it with the visuals out the window. “Looks just like the map,” he told Houston optimistically. He felt excitement as energy coursed through his body. Time passed. Now there was one last trip around the Moon. “As Al and I orbited only a few thousand meters above the highest lunar peaks, the familiar gray landscape became recognizable,” he recalled in his memoir. “There were mountains and valleys, a sun in the sky. For the first time in three days there was a relative up and down; the tiny Earth in the distance appeared as a satellite of the Moon.” But this time, as the two Apollo astronauts emerged from the backside of the Moon, something technical went terribly wrong. On the instrument panel an Abort signal flashed. In outer space Abort is not a nuanced word. Abort indicates halt, discontinue, terminate. This signal flashed again and again, indicating that there was something catastrophically wrong with the computer guidance system.
Mitchell’s mind scanned through various scenarios, he recalled in 2015. He had to stay focused on the solution. He could not allow his mind to think negatively, to consider that they may have come 240,000 miles only to be told to turn around and go home. He could not allow himself to think about Apollo 13, which suffered a technological failure that canceled its Moon landing and very nearly killed the astronauts on board. “Keep the mind focused,” Mitchell said to himself. Consider “the mysterious cadence of serendipity.” A voice from Houston interrupted his thoughts. “Ed, I wonder if you could try tapping the [instrument] panel,” someone said.
Mitchell tapped the panel. My God, he thought. The light actually went off. Filled with an enormous sense of relief, Mitchell took a deep inhale, then exhaled. Then the Abort light came back on. With detached acceptance, Mitchell says he wondered again whether they had really traveled all this way to turn back without landing on the Moon.
“Try tapping the panel a bit again,” Houston said.
“Okay,” Mitchell agreed, and tapped it.
“You tapped it again, right?” someone in Houston asked.
Yes, he’d tapped it. This time nothing happened. The Abort light continued to flash red. He and Shepard waited to hear what Houston said next. The silence was agonizing, he later recalled. Houston suggested that they make another rotation around the Moon. Do not think about this as rotation unlucky number thirteen, Mitchell told himself. Houston would work on the problem while the two astronauts were on the far side, or “dark side,” of the Moon, where there is no communication or signal line back to Earth. Have faith. Believe in serendipity, Mitchell repeated to himself, like a Mantra.
Back in Houston it was 2:00 a.m. At the Johnson Space Center, NASA engineers and technicians had little choice but to try to figure out how to bypass the Abort command. This meant calling a man named Don Eyles, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eyles, age twenty-seven, was the computer scientist who had designed the guidance system on Antares. When NASA called, Eyles was at the instrument laboratory at MIT, watching the Apollo 14 mission on TV. He needed to design a workaround that would cause the spaceship’s computer to override its own Abort signal, and he had less than two hours to do it. “We deceived the program by telling it an abort was already in progress,” Eyles recalled in 2016. It was a sixty-one-keystroke solution.
Houston relayed these sixty-one keystrokes to Ed Mitchell on Antares, who copied them down on a notepad. After they emerged from the far side and were in the first few seconds of their initial-descent engine burn, Mitchell entered these critical keystrokes into the computer—in an exact order and at precisely the right times—while simultaneously preparing to land. But now there was another problem. Dealing with the Abort signal had lengthened the mission. The new danger was that fuel was running out. The astronauts had to get down to the surface without delay. Shepard ran calculations. Based on the amount of fuel they had remaining in the landing tanks, even with a flawless landing the astronauts would have only seconds to spare before they would run out of fuel.
Mitchell focused his mind on landing. He could not allow his thoughts to linger on danger or fear. Never mind that the Abort signal had been turned off manually. This meant that if the astronauts really did need to abort for safety reasons, there would be no indicator alerting them to take that action. The need to abort was now going to be a manual call.
Mitchell and Shepard were readying for their descent onto the surface when a flashing light indicated a new problem: the landing radar was malfunctioning. Antares’s landing radar system allowed the craft to sense proximity to the surface as the module descended. Without this radar there would be no way to safely touch down. The target area on Fra Mauro was littered with boulders and meteor impact craters. The radar was designed to allow the craft to land on flat ground. Neither manual nor visual sensing was possible because the astronauts were facing upward during descent. If Antares landed on an incline, there was considerable risk that the module could tip over. And if it tipped over, it could not be righted by two men. The astronauts would run out of oxygen and die on the Moon.
Mitchell could feel his adrenaline soaring. Time was running out. Fuel was running low. As the lunar module pilot, landing was up to him, but this new code he’d just typed into the onboard system had somehow interfered with the landing radar. According to mission control rules, without landing radar there could be no landing on the Moon. At NASA, rules were rules. In 2015, Mitchell recalled Alan Shepard looking over at him and shaking his head i
n solidarity and disbelief.
What was going to happen? Had they really come this far to abort before they set foot on the Moon? If they were unable to land, surely this would be the end of the entire Apollo program. Mitchell took a deep breath. The communication channels were loud with static, he recalled. With all the noise, it was hard to hear. Unable to come up with anything else to do, he commanded the radar to obey.
“Come on, radar,” he said aloud. “Lock on!” An excruciating moment. Then another. “And just like that,” said Mitchell, “in the nick of time, the radar started up and locked in.”
The astronauts looked at their instrument panel. Shepard looked out the window. They were exactly where they were supposed to be.
“Right on the money,” Mitchell told Houston.
“Right on the money,” Shepard agreed.
“You are go for a landing,” said Houston.
“Shoot for the Moon,” Shepard said.
Mitchell read his position to Houston: they were at “2048 feet, coming down a little fast. 1500 feet. 500 feet. 100 feet. Starting down. 90 feet. 50 feet. 40. 20.”
Mitchell felt a bump. The footpads of Antares hit the Moon. “We’re on the surface,” Mitchell said. Mitchell had made the most precise landing to date, approximately eighty-seven feet from the targeted landing point.
“It felt tremendous,” he later recalled.
So little was known about this place. Only four explorers had been here before, on Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. The total time humans had spent on this lunar landscape was just 53 hours and seven minutes.
No one knows for sure how the Moon was formed, only that it was most likely once part of Earth. The prevailing theory is that the Moon was formed when the formerly larger Earth, called the protoearth, was impacted by a Mars-sized object that hit Earth with such force that it ejected debris that later formed our Moon. One thing was certain. Earth, with its moving plates and erupting volcanoes, was very different from the Moon, in that Earth destroys its own record over millions of years. The airless Moon is different. It appears to have no moving plates, and for this reason scientists believe the Moon’s surface has likely preserved a record of its history since it first formed. The idea that humans could learn more about Earth’s origins by investigating what remains on the Moon, by collecting rock samples from inside and outside the craters and bringing the samples back to Earth, was guiding the mission that lay ahead. Mitchell and Shepard were to collect rock samples from the 1,100-foot-wide, 750-foot-deep Cone Crater. That was the target.