Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell Dies

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man to walk on the moon, has died in Florida, aged 85.

Mitchell's 1971 mission with two fellow astronauts, the third US lunar landing, restored wavering public faith in NASA after the failure of Apollo 13.

The spaceman passed away on Thursday night at a hospice in West Palm Beach following a short illness, his daughter, Kimberly Mitchell, said.

His family said in a statement released by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation that he was a man of "extraordinary talents".

"He never tired of encouraging others to strive and explore," they said.

Mitchell, one of only 12 humans to set foot on the moon, had a lifelong interest in telepathy and other psychic phenomena.

In later years he spoke of his belief that peace-loving aliens had visited Earth to prevent nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union.

Mitchell grew up in New Mexico, near Roswell, and received flying lessons at a local airfield in return for washing planes.

He became a Navy pilot before joining NASA in 1966, helping to design the lunar modules that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first took to the moon in 1969.

During Apollo 14, Mitchell and crewmate Alan Shepard spent more than 33 hours on the moon's hilly Fra Mauro region.

They carried out over nine hours of lunar walks.

Stu Roosa, their pilot, remained in orbit aboard a capsule.

Shepard famously hit a golf ball which he claimed went "miles" in the low lunar gravity, while Mitchell threw a makeshift javelin.

Nine days after blasting off, they splashed back in the Pacific Ocean with a cargo of nearly 100lb (45kg) of moon rock for analysis.

On his flight home, Mitchell said he had a kind of epiphany while observing the Earth.

"What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness," he wrote in his 1996 autobiography.

"It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me."

Their success restored NASA's prestige after the failure of a previous mission dismayed President Richard Nixon and Congress.

Apollo 13's astronauts nearly died when an oxygen tank exploded as they neared the moon in 1970.

They made it home safely, but never set foot on the lunar surface.