Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Sixth Man On the Moon, Dies At 85 (examiner.com)

MarkWhittington writes: According to a story in the Palm Beach Post, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, has died at the age of 85. He flew as lunar module pilot on board Apollo 14, which flew to and from the moon between January 31, 1971 and February 9, 1971. His crewmates were Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa. Apollo 14 was the return to flight for the moon landing program after the near disaster of Apollo 13 in April 1970, and explored the Fra Mauro highlands on the lunar surface. NASA marks Mitchell's passing as well.

Comments

Not a bad deal, really.

[rmdingler]

If a prenuptial agreement with life had been presented to me when I was 21 or 22, I would've happily signed on for walking on the moon & living into my 80's.

He had an interesting life; probably never dull and with few regrets.

Rest in peace, astronaut.

Re:Not a bad deal, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly few regrets... but think about what it would be like, after that event. You were one of the first few human beings to ever walk on another planet, and now... what? What can you ever do or experience in the rest of your life that is going to compare to that?

Well, sure, maybe there are other highly important things to some people, like having children. But that's very different. That's something almost anyone can do, and countless people do every single day. But walking on another world? That's in a different category.

So I could see room for a feeling that the most important thing you're ever going to do, is now done. Some, like Aldrin, have gone into public service and public policy, trying to shape the future as they want to see it. Others became near recluses. But I don't think it's easy, per se, to be an ex-moon-walker earthling.

Re:Not a bad deal, really.

[rmdingler]

People are often surprised when their heroes turn out to be regular, mortal, flawed human beings.

Actually, it makes the accomplishment even more amazing for its rather humble origin.

The really sad thing

[JoshuaZ]

The really sad thing here is that it is likely that all of the original Apollo astronauts will be dead before anyone else goes to any non-Earth body.

Sad in a philosophical sense

[Okian Warrior]

The really sad thing here is that it is likely that all of the original Apollo astronauts will be dead before anyone else goes to any non-Earth body.

While I agree that this is sad in a philosophical sense, we should also consider that while we haven't sent people to a non-Earth body, we *have*:

1) Landed on a comet
2) Got up-close-and-personal images of Pluto
3) Also Charon
4) Discovered over 5000 exoplanets
5) Send a probe out of the solar system (*)
6) Maintained a manned space station for the last 18 years
7) Sent several robots wandering around mars and taking pictures
8) (And occasionally vaporizing the miniature martian town centers with its "heat ray")

And a bunch of other things, such as mapping the CMB, finding strong evidence for dark matter, imaged an exoplanet, gotten spectrometer readings of the atmosphere in an exoplanet, found an asteroid with rings, and many minor things.

I'm not sure what the utility of sending a human into space is at the present time. Unless there's an obvious use case, it *seems* like the extra effort of sending a human isn't worth the risk, except as a political statement.

Oh, and we're seriously considering mining asteroids. How cool is that?

(*) Depending on the definition of the boundary, and the current definition is "cloudy" at that point, so that the probe seems to be going into and out of the boundary that defines the solar system edge.

Re:Sad in a philosophical sense

[Sarten-X]

The utility of humans in space is the long list of minor things that didn't make it onto your list of headlines. Crystallography, metallurgy, chemistry, biology, physiology, and materials science, to name a few, are all fields that have benefited from research on the ISS.

For having so many small experiments and projects to maintain, a human presence is really not that much more effort compared to building robotic versions of each experiment. The human is also far more adaptable, able to repair and rebuild systems as needed.