In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
Edgar Mitchell (1930 – )
Edgar Dean Mitchell is an American pilot, retired Captain in the United States Navy and NASA astronaut. As the Lunar Module pilot of Apollo 14, he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region (a selenological formation on the near side of Earth’s Moon that served as the landing site for the American Apollo 14 mission in 1971) making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon.
