It was a God thing that Edgar Mitchell had been grounded.
My microscopic role was that I was the marketing engineer for the first integrated circuit to fly in space and it was on the Apollo flights. It was sold to Ryan aircraft in San Diego; and, at the time, I was aware that an astronaut was assisting in the design.
While the crisis was unfolding, I learned that Mitchell, the astronaut that quarterbacked the fix for Apollo 13, was the person in the background, because he was the one staying up night and day to assist. He was the most knowledgeable of everything on the LEM; he even remembered ‘my’ circuit, a dual one-shot flip-flop. He also pointed out the size of the computer on the LEM – 64,000 BITS; which translates to 8 kilobytes, 8kb – less memory then a one-page letter today.
Months later, Mitchell flew Apollo 14. It was funny to many of us when we asked him about his flight back. He started by saying, “I had nothing to do (yeah, sure), so I was looking out the window and I could see the sun, the moon, and the Earth – all at once – and I had an epiphany …”
A couple years after his return to earth, he started the Institute Of Noetic Sciences (IONS). In my mind, I’m sure that Apollo 13 would not have made it back if the Great Spirit had not grounded his flight team so that Mitchell could quarterback the fix.
“I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion—was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discrete things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description. What was needed was a new story of who we are and what we are capable of becoming.”
-Dr. Edgar Mitchell
Sept. 17, 1930 – February 4, 2016
Rich Meyer- Author, Blogger
