edgar-mitchell

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These were the days when computer technology was relatively new,
and this, in part, was what set our program ahead of the Soviets’ in space
endeavors. NASA designs took advantage of new innovations in lightweight
materials and microcircuitry. Obviously, the smaller and lighter you could
make your equipment, the less fuel your rocket consumed. You could go
farther, faster, and for longer periods of time. The Soviets, however, not
having the benefit of these technologies, were burdened with designing
and developing monstrous rocket engines capable of lifting immense payloads
to accomplish the same tasks. But at the time this proved beyond the
state-of-the art of rocketry, so the Soviets were unable to send (and then
recover) manned payloads to the moon.
Computer technology was something I understood quite well, having
been introduced to it during my post-graduate work a few years earlier. I
knew the principles by which they operated, and understood the analogies
scientists were beginning to make with the human brain—the early work in
artificial intelligence. But what I was growing fascinated with was not
computer technology alone, but rather the nature of consciousness itself.
My burgeoning interest was only a pale vision of what was to come. There
seemed to be an entire panoply of ideas that the project of landing a man
on the moon was stirring into awareness. Buckminster Fuller once said
that to understand the human condition, one must begin with the universe.
But a mystic would say that to understand the universe, one must
begin with the Self. Not for 15 years would I recognize that both answers
are correct, and converge to the same point. At the time I only began to
perceive a glimmer that perhaps this project was part of some grand progression
in evolution by which we enhanced the process of self-discovery. I
recognized in the diminutive circuitry of computers an analogy to how our
own consciousness was evolving. The computer hardware was analogous to
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