edgar-mitchell

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In January of 1971, I boarded a spacecraft and traveled to an airless
world of brilliant clarity. The soil there is barren and gray, and the horizon
always further than it appears. It is a static world that has only known
silence. Upon its landscape human perspective is altered.
During the 15 years prior to the moment my friend Alan Shepard and
I opened the door to the lunar module and descended the ladder to the
dusty surface of the moon, my days had progressed more or less as I’d
planned. But this wasn’t the achievement of an individual, a space agency,
or even a country. This was, rather, the achievement of our species, our
civilization. Life had come a long way since it first sprang from the Earth’s
rock and water. And now, hundreds of thousands of miles away on that
small blue and white sphere, millions of human beings were watching two
men walk about the surface of another world for the third time in our
history. These were momentous days, extraordinary for their audacity,
extraordinary for the coordination of minds and skills that made them
possible. A lot of hard work by some of the most brilliant men and women
on the planet had culminated in making us a space-faring species. But
what I did not know as Alan and I worked on that waterless world, in a
mountainous region known as Fra Mauro, was that I had yet to grasp what
would prove most extraordinary about the journey.
It wasn’t until after we had made rendezvous with our friend Stu Roosa
in the Kittyhawk command module and were hurtling Earthward at several
miles per second, that I had time to relax in weightlessness and contemplate
that blue jewel-like home planet suspended in the velvety blackness
from which we had come. What I saw out the window was all I had ever
known, all I had ever loved and hated, all that I had longed for, all that I
once thought had ever been and ever would be. It was all there suspended
in the cosmos on that fragile little sphere. What I experienced was a grand
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