Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Something happens to you out there," explains Apollo 14 Astronaut Ed Mitchell. As a result of what happened to him, he has since quit the space program, divorced his wife and begun to devote himself full-time to an unlikely pursuit for an M.I.T. graduate: research into extrasensory perception (ESP), which he feels may help people round the world to achieve greater "intuitive" communication...
Walking on the moon was a religious experience for Apollo 15 Astronaut Jim Irwin, who was "deeply moved by the beauty of the lunar mountains and felt the presence of God." A month after his return, he says, "I knew that God had called me to his service." He quit the astronaut program, dubbed himself the "moon missionary," and became a lay preacher on the Southern Baptist evangelical circuit...
While he was peering out of the hatch of Apollo 16 onto the lunar landscape, Charles Duke recalls, "I was overwhelmed by the certainty that what I was witnessing was part of the universality of God." When he looked at his fresh footprints in the almost ageless lunar dust, "I just choked up. Tears came. It was the most deeply moving experience of my life." Even the sometimes brittle Alan Shepard, America's first man in space, admits that he has changed: "I was a rotten s.o.b. before I left. Now I'm just an s.o.b...
...deepest emotions in space seem to have involved man's home planet. Says Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon and now a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati: "I remember on the trip home on Apollo 11 it suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." To Apollo 8's Bill Anders, seeing the earth from out there evoked...
Seen from space, the distant earth turned the thoughts of many astronauts to environmental problems. "I wondered how everyone is going to live on that small, crowded globe," recalls John Young of Apollo 10 and 16. Even during the tense hours after the explosion of an oxygen tank, Apollo 13's Jack Swigert found himself concerned with the terrestrial environment-and suddenly certain about how to preserve it: "I became convinced that space technology-earth-resources satellites, solar-energy generators, global communications networks and the like-is the answer to the environmental disasters that threaten this fragile earth...