The Ultimate Spiritual Awakening: How Going to the Moon Changed the Astronauts

great piece and food for thought. my pops wrote me about this yesterday. it affected him a lot–looking up at the moon as a little boy and wondering if it would be possible (like in the sci-fi movies) for someone to get up there and set foot on it–then later watching it happen.

still weird to look up there and imagine walking around up there, driving some lunar dune buggy, and hitting a golf ball (wtf). I guess that’s the best you can do really. There’s no water there, no waves.

i can only image what it means to the spirit to look down upon Earth as a shifting orb of white and blue and green.

One need not go to the moon, perhaps one need only look at it and know that we have been there.

p.s. UFO’s are real, I saw one last thursday over the Cascade mountains.

If we need to implement this on a global scale, we’ll have to go to Mars.

Going to the moon, what an awesome travel story. Thanks for this novel story.

When I was a graduate student at the Ohio State University, I was a member of AIAA. We hosted a student Aerospace Engineering conference for our region and Edgar Mitchell was the keynote speaker. I picked him up at the airport, and took him back after the dinner and speech. The man is an accomplished pilot and brilliant engineer. He was also deeply moved by the experience. When I saw him exit the plane he was older and smaller than his pictures. As soon as we got in the car he smoked a lucky strike, not the image NASA promotes for its astronauts. On the way to the dinner we didn’t say much. On the way back it was dark. The stars were out. He cracked the window and lit another cigarette and stared up at the stars. I hope you don’t mind he said absently, referring to his cigarette. I was thrilled to spend some time with the man. I was hoping we’d leave before now he said. Well, folks had a lot of questions. Yah. He took a drag and blew it out the window. Then another, and threw the cigarette out and rolled up the window. Ever been afraid of the dark? he asked me. When I was small I guess. He nodded. Yah, sometimes I’m still afraid he said. Maybe afraid overstates it. I couldn’t imagine a war hero, fighter jock, test pilot astronaut, being afraid of anything and said so. Yeah, afraid is not the right word. Then he told me the story of his return to the moon. It comes from staring out the window for too long. They actually had that on the work schedule. The Lunar Module pilot, me, spends four days flying from Moon to Earth looking out the window. Bad idea. I drive on saying nothing. On the way out everyone’s excited, and busy as all hell. Too much to do and not enough time to do it in. On the way back, Al and Stu are till busy. Me, it was make work. We had inertial guidance, we had radar fixes hourly from the ground, me staring out the window with a sextant to check the IGS and radar was just make work.

Al and I were still on the lunar surface at Fra Mauro and Stu made a plane change maneuver to place the command and service modules and the lunar module in the same orbital plane at lunar module lift off.

We blasted off the moon into a 52 mile by 9 mile orbit. We tweaked the orbit to achieve rendezvous.

We docked, transferred all the stuff we were taking back, and jettisoned the lunar module ascent stage. It impacted on the lunar surface 36 miles west of teh Apollo 14 landing site and 62 miles east of the Apollo 12 landing site. As lunar module pilot, that’s when my workload ended.

Stu burned the Service module main engine 148 seconds on the lunar backside out of contact with Earth to add 3,500 ft/sec to our speed, and return us to Earth. It was the 34th orbit at 148th hour in the mission.

We rounded the moon’s backside 20 minutes later and the Earth rose above the lunar surface, and we made contact with Houston. I climbed down beneath the seats to the G&C control panel and optics and began marking times and positions where stars rose and set from behind the Earth and moon. This gave a precise triangulation where we were relative to both. It was make work, but I liked looking out at the stars as we flew along. The spacecraft would roll and I’d see Earth, then the moon and the sun then the Earth again.

We were in constant contact with Houston on the way back. On the way out the high gain antenna didn’t want to track properly, but transearth it was okay. Houston would radio up star positions and I’d shoot them, recording the precise moment they disappeared below the lunar horizon fixed in my cross hairs. .

It was just getting dark in Moscow. the Sun was rising in Tokyo. The lights came on in Moscow. I remember my last goodwill trip to both places. Iberia was a bright green, and a storm ravaged the Amazon basin. I remember survival training at these places. I noticed it was noon in Houston and asked Fred Haise, capcom if he had had lunch yet. He said he did, and repeated a running joke we had about the food NASA provided its astronaut corps. I recalled the folks who served us lunch back at Houston, and knew exactly what the government issue applesauce tasted like there. I thought of my wife and wondered about a tree I remember from the Amazon and wondered how it was faring under the storm and the howler monkeys it was home to.

Fred said we’d be coming up over Fra Mauro, and I switched to a high mag eyepiece. As we rose above the moon, where I was standing just a few hours before, I could see the Parry Hills change perspective just like they did when I was on the descent track over Tolansky crater. Awesome. I got the highest power eyepiece I had, and switched to it. I was there again, flying over the surface. Its awesome Fred! Affirmative he replied.

As the spacecraft turned back toward Earth in its barbecue roll, I kept the eyepiece in to see how clearly I could see Earth – the shadows in the rocky mountains at the continental divide, was like I was there looking at them in Denver. Mars should be somewhere around there, I thought. And found it. Mars was a tiny red dot, startling in its clarity. Damn. I could see the shadows of its surface. Then the sun. And I had in my head, with all the shadows, on the two worlds I had been to, and one I had not, the local time of every place on all three worlds – a miniature solar system buzzing in my head.

I missed a star sighting. Fred reminded me.

Sorry, I’m fooling around with eyepieces up here.

Close enough for government work.

I see the Milky Way and decide to peek at it with the high power eyepiece – and the silky smooth expanse of stars resolved into millions of tiny independent points hard and uncaring – and

and what? I asked.

it hit me.

What?

Its real he said.

Yeah, so?

No, you don’t get it. The moon, mars, the stars, they’re just ideas you know about. I’ve been there, and traveled between worlds. So, I relate to it all in a different way.

What way?

The REALITY OF IT. The moon, isn’t just a spot in the sky for me. I’ve been there. And in that moment, I could see the Earth as a distant spot like you see the moon, but I’ve been all over the Earth. And I looked at mars in a clarity no one has ever seen with their own eyes before – and I FELT the REALITY of these AS REAL PLACES. But the Milky Way was too much.

How? I asked, navigating the car toward the airport.

I don’t think you realized just how big the cosmos is! Its all real, real as sin, and I got a little afraid, afraid of the dark. I had to take a moment and get myself together after that. In fact, I didn’t take any more sightings.

I didn’t say anything.

Its real as sin. The feeling permeates you and you get really scared for a minute imagining what things are out there that can get you. Then, you realize, we’ve been around here for a long time – and you look out again – and the universe seems friendly and caring – loving even. With a love as real as the love my wife feels for me back in Houston. That love flows into you and calms you in a way that is scary to anyone who pretends to scientific knowledge and analysis. I just couldn’t look anymore. I still can’t. Its too real.

We drove on a few more miles.

I felt like that about a woman I loved once – I offered. Yeah, he replied, you can’t stand to see it, it just fills you with tears.

So, Edgar came back and founded the Noetic Sciences Institute, Alan Bean became an artist, to record what it felt like for him – and he figured paintings might last longer than our creaking society in the nuclear age – and they’d tell their own story. Others became ministers. Still others dare devils. All dealing with the same experience.

NASA eventually withdrew from the moon, and the altitude the Shuttle flies is more like high altitude flight than real space travel. Still there are vague stirrings of feelings – but nothing like striding between worlds.

Some day it will come. A traveler from Earth who returns a visionary from the stars, to tell us what it all means. The photo of Earth from the moon released an idea of the Earth as a place and gave rise to the environmental movement. It ended the bomb shelter craze. Before Apollo American built bomb shelters. After Apollo, it didn’t seem like a credible threat. After two generations of low altitude flight around Earth, we are being urged to build bomb shelters again.

Other ages, with other travelers and concerns, will give rise to other insights other movements and advance us as a species into the modern age. Not just telling us how to do things. But why we should do them as well. In ways that make sense in ways we don’t have sense to think today.

These are the real riches of deep space travel.

They are the same riches that the frontier always brings to the center.

We give them up at our peril.