Edgar Mitchell
Edgar Mitchell
Edgar Dean "Ed" Mitchellwas an American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, ufologist and NASA astronaut. As the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 14, he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAstronaut
Date of Birth17 September 1930
CityHereford, TX
CountryUnited States of America
moving civilization self
Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.
mean moon civilization
Certainly whatever climate change and global warming means, we've got a big issue here. Right now, this civilization or this period that we're in is probably going to need the resources off our planet, perhaps the resources from the asteroids, perhaps there will be some on the moon, perhaps some on Mars that we can utilize for our own uses here.
civilization earth problem
The main problem is that we, as an Earth civilization, have not come to understand ourselves - see ourselves in a cosmic sense at all.
civilization perspective ego
Transcendence gets you beyond ego. If you go beyond ego, you see all of this in a more decent perspective and you can start to put all the pieces together. We haven't done that yet. Not as a civilization.
civilization curves growth
We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.
civilization people world
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.
burn capable flight future nations planet sometime space
We need a community of nations capable of space flight because we all have to be off this planet sometime in the future. Our sun is going to burn out eventually, and we are not in a sustainable situation.
act beyond due evolving explore learning ourselves provided solar view
We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization.
types
We do need different types of propulsion to get to Mars. I wrote one of the first Ph.D. theses on that in the 1960s.
base belt gravity offer resource trying
I don't think there is much value in trying to use the moon as a base to go to Mars. That's going into one gravity belt and having to get back out of it again. And the moon doesn't have a lot to offer as a resource base.
almost best century earth entire exist experience fact far hazardous learn moon scientific stations
The best experience that we have on Earth is the fact that we have scientific stations, weathering over stations down in the Antarctic for almost the entire 20th century to learn how to exist in exceedingly hazardous conditions; and the Moon is far more hazardous than Antarctica. At least they have water there.
admit benevolent home male pig sort tells
My wife tells me I am a male chauvinist pig and I have to sort of admit it. In my office and in my home, I'm not very democratic. I think of myself as a benevolent dictator.
apollo careful mission science time
Our mission on Apollo 14 was to be the first to do science on the moon, so we had to be careful about getting everything in during the allotted time.
harvard heavens mit studied
I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.