Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, pilot of the Apollo 14 lunar module, died Thursday in Palm Beach, Florida. He was 85.
"On behalf of the entire NASA family, I would like to express my condolences to the family and friends of NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell,' NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement issued Friday. "He believed in exploration, having been drawn to NASA by President Kennedy's call to send humans to the moon. He is one of the pioneers in space exploration on whose shoulders we now stand."
Mitchell's death occurred on the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing which took place on Feb. 5, 1971 with the Apollo crew of Mitchell, Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa. Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the moon, making a pair of trips to the lunar surface during the mission, according to NASA.
Mitchell's work included deploying scientific instruments and performing communication tests. He also took photos of the lunar surface and any deep space phenomena, NASA said. He and Shephard set mission records for the time of the longest distance traversed on the lunar surface; the largest payload returned from lunar surface; and the longest lunar stay time (33 hours). They were also the first to transmit color TV from the lunar surface.
In a 1997 interview included in NASA's oral history program, Mitchell said his interest in exploration and discovery dated back to his childhood.
"To me, that (spaceflight) was the culmination of my being, and what can I learn from this? What is it we are learning? That's important, because I think what we're trying to do is discover ourselves and our place in the cosmos, and we don't know. We're still looking for that," Mitchell said.
Mitchell's death leaves only seven survivors of the 12 men who have walked on the moon: Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, David Scott, John W. Young, Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.
Mitchell, a native of Hereford, Texas who held a doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1966. He served on the support crew for Apollo 9 and as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10 and played a key role in the lunar module simulator at the Johnson Space Center during Apollo 13, developing procedures that would bring the crew of that crippled spacecraft home.
After retiring from NASA and the U.S. Navy, Mitchell and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973, to research paranormal phenomena and consciousness. He was also co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers, an organization for space travelers. Mitchell was a firm believer in extra-terrestrial life and often spoke about the possibilities of a government cover-up of an alien crash at Roswell, New Mexico. In 2011, Mitchell was in the headlines after the federal government threatened to sue him over a camera he'd kept as a memento of his spaceflight, though NASA eventually agreed to display the camera at the National Air and Space Museum.