edgar-mitchell

Into the Vacuum 63
racket of latches closing and joining the two spacecraft. For the time being
we were back on a nominal mission to the moon. Here lives and missions
were saved by improvisation.
For three days we flew across the abyss of space at the rate of several
miles per second, making only a small adjustment along the way to assure
our arrival at the precise point behind the moon to achieve lunar orbit. As
the arbitrary calendar of days passed, the moon grew in the window, and
the topography of the craters became clearly discernible. Slowly the view
took on a surreal beauty.
Space travel requires intense concentration for long periods of time,
interspersed with moments of high drama when either a burn is required
or trouble arises. In the vocation of flying it is called hours-of-intenseboredom-punctuated-by-moments-of-stark-terror.
However, spaceflight
was—and still is—too new for actual boredom to arise. But it is not an
exaggeration to say that with each burn the outcome is uncertain, and the
success of the mission is at stake. Especially during the early space missions.
Before the construction of reusable shuttle craft, each piece of flight
hardware was new and untested in the space environment. Unlike earthbound
equipment, there is no opportunity for a test flight. And without
precise execution of burns, the craft might assume a trajectory that would
send it into deep space, skittering across the Earth’s atmosphere, or into
an unforgiving heavenly body such as the moon. Preparing for a burn is
serious business, and before each one, Stu would announce, “It’s sweaty
palms time again, gentlemen.”
But there was another task I’d planned to perform that wasn’t on the
checklist. And there were but four people on Earth aware of it. Every
evening as the crew settled in for an attempt at sleep in zero-gravity, and
the cabin grew quiet, I would take a moment and pull out my kneeboard,
on which I had copied a table of random numbers, along with the five
“Zener symbols” used in ESP experiments and made popular by Dr. J.B.
Rhine: a square, a circle, a star, a cross, and a wavy line. Then I promptly
and discretely began the simple experiment that Ed Boyle, Ed Maxey, and
I had devised. Not even Al or Stu knew what I was up to.
On four evenings, twice on our way to and from the moon, I matched
one of the symbols with a random number between one and five, and then
organized the numbers with a random number table copied from a math
textbook. In this setting I would concentrate on a symbol for 15 seconds.
Meanwhile, through tens of thousands of miles of empty space, my collaborators
in Florida would attempt to jot down the symbols in the same
sequence that I had arranged on my kneeboard. We each had a column of
25 spaces in which to write symbols for each of the six days I would be in
transit. Then I zipped myself into my hammock each “night” after performing