Growing up as a baby boomer during the decade known as the Soaring Sixties, the early Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space mission astronauts loomed as large to me as any of the venerated sports heroes of the day.

The world lost a true space pioneer last Thursday when Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon and one of only 12 humans to set foot on the lunar surface, died at age 85 in a West Palm Beach hospice after a short illness.Mitchell's Apollo 14 mission came a year after the Apollo 13 astronauts were nearly killed when an oxygen tank exploded as they neared the moon. That 1970 mission, however, was called a "successful failure" because of the experience NASA gained in rescuing the crew.After the aborted Apollo 13 moon landing, support for the Apollo program was being questioned by President Richard Nixon, Congress and the public. Alan Shepard, Mitchell and Stu Roosa were the first crew to help revive NASA's goals amid that falling support. In a 1997 interview, Mitchell said that if Apollo 14 had failed, it would probably have ended the Apollo program.During the Apollo 13 crisis, Mitchell provided critical advice in the effort to bring the astronauts home safely. He spent five days in the lunar module simulator, creating the procedures that had to be used. NASA then radioed them up to the stranded crewmen in space.Shepard later wrote that Mitchell remained "Mr. Unflappable" during the Apollo 13 scare. When Shepard was asked why he picked Mitchell as his Lunar Module pilot, he answered "Because I wanted to come home."That sentiment was also shared by Mitchell's other contemporaries in the NASA fraternity.Born in Hereford, Texas, Mitchell developed a love of flying after his family moved to New Mexico. He made his first solo flight at the age of 14 and earned his pilot's license at the age of 16.The space pioneer had a Pennsylvania connection. In 1952, he received a Bachelor of Science from what is now Carnegie Mellon in industrial management. He joined the Navy and got a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining NASA.Mitchell was awarded honorary doctorates from the New Mexico State University, the University of Akron, Carnegie Mellon and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.I got to hear Mitchell speak in person at the commencement of my nephew's graduating class at Embry-Riddle in Daytona, Florida.Mitchell claimed to have had an "epiphany" in space which influenced his study of consciousness, physics and other mysteries. He explained that his experiences during the moon mission gave him an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness.With presidential politics dominating so much of the news these days, some of Mitchell's words now seem quite profound. He said from the moon, international politics were insignificant.Mitchell sounded bluntly Trump-esque in his denunciation of individual politics when compared to the awesomeness of 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," he said. "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 -----.' "By JIM ZBICK |

tneditor@tnonline.com