The Starman’s childhood was idyllic, at least in his telling. Born in small town Texas in 1930, Edgar Mitchell moved to Roswell, in New Mexico’s Pecos Valley, when he was five. His father was a third-generation rancher, and this was cattle country, and it was here that they settled upon their farm beside the Berrendo Creek where elms and cottonwoods grew.
The Mitchells lived in a small clapboard house, surrounded by their livestock. As a boy, the future astronaut helped bale hay, mend fences and milk cows. He learnt to ride horses; he played with his dog Oscar. The family went camping, where they caught rainbow trout in a busy stream, and when Mitchell wasn’t reading Buck Rogers comics by flashlight in his tent, he was outside it staring happily at the stars.
From a young age, Mitchell was captivated by flying. He’d marvel at the occasional bi-plane crop duster he saw in the distance, and would later tell the story of watching, as a four-year-old, a “barnstormer” – an experimental stunt pilot – desperately land his plane on his family’s Texan farm after running out of fuel. Mitchell’s father ran to the nearest town to purchase gas and, in gratitude, the pilot gave both father and son a quick, low flight over the Texan cotton fields. “The three of us climbed into the two-seat plane, and as I sat on Dad’s lap I could feel his strong arms wrap around me, holding me tightly,” Mitchell wrote in his 2014 memoir, Earthrise. “As we roared down the cotton field, my stomach swirled and I felt the rush of excitement as the plane lifted up, up into the sky. I felt a little nervous until I looked out the window and saw my world from a whole new perspective.”
One early morning in July 1945, when Mitchell was 15 years old, he glimpsed an extraordinary flash outside his bedroom window. It was the Trinity Test, the world’s first nuclear detonation, made some 220 miles away in Los Alamos. But Mitchell didn’t know that then, nor did he know that many years later he would come to believe – after he’d returned from the moon – that his own town of Roswell would be chosen by extra-terrestrials to warn about humanity’s nuclear self-destruction.
Almost exactly two years after Trinity, Mitchell read in the local Roswell Daily Record an amazing headline: “[Roswell Army Airforce] Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region”. Just days later, the ‘paper would report that the “flying saucer” was in fact just a weather balloon – something which, to this day, is considered by a zealous few as an official fiction and cover-up.
Those few would include Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, and while Roswell would remain cattle country, from the early years of the Cold War it also became a global by-word for alien visitation and government conspiracy. (It wasn’t quite a weather balloon, by the way, but one of many giant experimental balloons designed by the US military to detect Soviet nuclear tests. They comprised Project Mogul, but the project was soon abandoned.)
And so amongst the elms and cottonwoods, there were also glimpses of the atom bomb and other world-shaping military experiments. Enshrouding their simple agricultural existence was the mysterious ambience of the Cold War, and later Mitchell would come to see this conjunction as greatly influencing his strange life.
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There was no expectation for Edgar to become a rancher himself. His parents encouraged his studies, and one day in the late 1940s he said goodbye to the ranch and the southwest and took a long train ride to his Pennsylvanian college. His mother had prepared a lunchbox for the journey.
At college he earned a degree in industrial management, then enlisted with the navy. The Korean War was on, and Mitchell wanted to fly. His interest in aviation had proven sticky.
And he was good at it. Very good. He had both an analytical mind and bold spirit – was equally interested in how flight worked, but also in experiencing its furthest edges. There was a six-month combat deployment, in which he was almost shot from the sky, after which he became a navy test pilot – the exclusive petri dish for America’s first astronauts. Not that he knew that then.
Mitchell was now married with a small child, and before his journey into space and his ecstatic revelation of “cosmic unity”, there was the disruptive and very earthly “zig-zagging” across the country between various military bases. His wife was patient, heroically accommodating, and took jobs waitressing at diners in military towns across the country.
When Mitchell first learnt that the Russians had launched the first man-made satellite into orbit – Sputnik 1 – they’d just moved to China Lake, California. “A very isolated and barren town near the Mojave Desert,” he later wrote. “Here, my duties were to figure out how to fly planes to drop bombs below enemy radar and then speed away.”
It was 1957. And it was then that he knew he wanted to be a Starman.
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Mitchell had literally watched the birth of the atom bomb, and now the southwest of his childhood was a large stage for its testing. In the early 1950s, the US government moved nuclear tests from the Pacific Ocean back to domestic soil, where there was less chance of enemy surveillance. The government chose an area of the Mojave Desert in Nevada, 105 kilometres from Las Vegas, and preferred for its relative remoteness and favourable climate.
Las Vegans initially objected, fearing their nascent industries of gambling, prostitution and shot-gun weddings would suffer. They needn’t have worried. The federal government issued false assurances of safety, the Nevada Chamber of Commerce spruiked commercial benefits, and local columnists argued that the tests were a redemptive opportunity – that Sin City would now be known for its contribution to national security, and not merely for its provision of “doubtful pleasures”.
At dawn on January 27, 1951, a brilliant flash – seen as far as San Francisco – marked the beginning of Operation Ranger, the first series of atomic tests in Nevada. Witnesses in Las Vegas described an astonishingly intense light, followed, seven minutes later, by shockwaves. The force blew out windows and fractured hotel walls along the casino strip. No one was injured.
And so began the Vegas dawn parties. Rechristened “Atomic City”, Vegas’s casinos and hotels hosted raucous parties, starting at midnight and fuelled by the “atomic cocktail” – a potent mix of vodka, brandy and champagne. The house pianist played boogie-woogie and jazz standards until dawn, when revellers retired to the roof in the hope of experiencing the flash, the cloud, and, seven minutes later, the shockwaves.
Bomb tourists couldn’t be guaranteed their explosion because the Atomic Energy Commission was not yet declaring test dates. But averaging a blast every 48 hours for the project’s one-month duration, tourists could almost be assured of one if they stayed a few days. As tourism increased, the chamber of commerce persuaded the AEC to publicise the dates, and then gave blast calendars to visitors.
Only later would all of this conjoin in Mitchell’s head – much later, when the CIA were taking an interest in his experiments and his wife had left him for his strangeness.