edgar-mitchell

Sea of Sky 45
Oftentimes, the seriousness of the points in debate only thinly disguised
the fact that allocation of funds was the underlying issue. Unmanned advocates
felt shorted both in resources and accolades, ignoring the political
reality that it was the public’s personal identification with human adventure
that made it possible to raise funds at all. The public was launched
into outer space through the experiences of the astronaut. Through the
astronauts, the public walked on other worlds. Were we to ask any of the
men and women in the space program who have died in the line of duty, or
who will yet surely do so, I believe they would offer simple answers: We
should go forward for reasons that nourish the human spirit, simply because
we are capable of doing so.
My own thinking on human space exploration has deepened with the
years, as research on intelligent machines and on the nature of consciousness
has progressed. The differing viewpoints of astronauts, scientists, and others
(funding issues aside) originate fundamentally from widely differing
beliefs about the origin, meaning and destiny of life. Ultimately, our joint
quest is to one day bring these questions to meaningful conclusions.
During the era of the Apollo Program of lunar exploration, it was
conventional wisdom in both scientific and theological circles that not
only were we alone in this vast universe, but also that the speed-of-light
limitation from Einstein’s theory of special relativity forever doomed us as
a species to this middle-aged solar system on the fringes of the Milky Way
galaxy. It is quite intriguing that a handful of scientists, the most prominent
of whom were Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, were able to find the
funds and government support to establish a radio astronomy project called
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Its objective was, and
still is, to search the heavens for some coherent electromagnetic signal
that would reveal the presence of an alien intelligence. This was established
in spite of almost unanimous belief in the academic world of the
period that life was such a freak accident of nature that it surely could not
have occurred more than once. I was intrigued by SETI, for I had long
questioned the dogma of our aloneness—it just wasn’t reasonable to me.
Also, Sagan delivered a number of lectures to assist us in the preparation
for lunar exploration. I admired his boldness on this ET matter.
In the background, barely discernable above the noise of daily events,
there had been persistent and serious claims beginning in the 1940s, coupled
with adamant government denials, that extraterrestrial craft have been
visiting Earth. I was much too busy with preparations for Apollo to be
distracted by this controversy. During my operational years as a naval officer
and aviator, I was well aware of the rules and procedures for reporting
unidentified aerial sightings. Although I never had occasion to test the
system by making a UFO report, I had heard stories circulating in the