When Bean returned to earth he would sit in shopping malls, simply to marvel at the variety of human life. And he has never again complained about the weather:"I'm just glad there is weather." As so often , a journey into the unkonwn had revealed more about the destination.
Virtually every Apollo astronaut came back with a deep sense of the earth's fragility. Ed Mitchell, moonwalker No 6:" When we see ourselves in this bigger perspective-- call it the ET point of view -- a shitf takes pace in your perception and you start to think quite differently." Apollo 16's Charlie Duke describes earth as" hanging in space like a jewel". "People are always asking what we discovered when we went to the moon," says Dick Gordon, of Apollo 12."What we discovered was the earth."