edgar-mitchell

44
The Way of the Explorer
I saw the way he worked as much in the capacity of a humanitarian as
a scientist. His work in building the Redstone and Saturn rockets was
grounded to his belief that man himself must explore the cosmos, that we
cannot be content in sending android surrogates in our place. From the
dialog I began with him in Alabama, I came to understand the general
nature of his mind. He was not only brilliant in the science of rocketry,
but also extraordinarily prescient in his philosophy concerning realms of
study that had yet to be seriously considered by mainstream scientists. This
was, in a sense, the story of his life (in time, we would both discover we
had much in common), but in an organization as large as NASA, bureaucracy
was bound to wreak silent havoc and gradually impair the original
vision. Men such as von Braun, I would soon learn, suffered real despair as
the rigidity of mounting bureaucracy stifled innovation. Von Braun was a
man who needed adequate terrain on which to implement such a vast
dream.
A momentous week for me occurred in late summer 1971, after my
spaceflight, and several months before von Braun left NASA for private
industry. A NASA planning conference was held at a remote ocean resort,
and I was the designated astronaut representative. Attendees were quartered
in picturesque seaside bungalows. My housemates for this occasion
were Wernher von Braun and the equally legendary Arthur C. Clarke,
both world-class visionaries. The opportunity to privately probe the minds
of these extraordinary men for several days still ranks in my mind as a
highlight in my career, second only to spaceflight itself.
During the early days of the space program, a profound debate surfaced
in scientific circles, almost from the moment Alan Shepard climbed
into Freedom 7 atop one of von Braun’s tiny Redstone rockets and roared
into a suborbital trajectory for the first time. The debate centered on this
question of whether we should send men into space, or machines in our
place. The argument continues to this day, as it has been renewed with
each budget cut and tragic mishap. Taking men and women into such an
unforgiving environment is both dangerous and expensive, but machines
are of course expendable and far less costly.
Just after The Fire in 1967, the debate rose to a fever pitch, and in the
1970s, with the success of the unmanned Voyager projects, the question
was raised again and again. It seemed to resurface with the transmission of
each byte of data, and the reception here on Earth of each fantastically
surreal photograph of the distant planets it neared. Finally, in 1986, with
the fiery death of an entire shuttle crew, the debate seemed to come to a
head. Why risk the lives of our bravest and brightest when machines can
perform essentially the same tasks nearly as well, and much less expensively