“The biggest joy was on the way home,” he recalled. “In my cockpit window, every two minutes: the earth, the moon, the sun, and the whole panorama of the heavens. That was a powerful, overwhelming experience. “And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness … It wasn’t ‘Them and Us,’ it was ‘That’s me! That’s all of it, it’s one thing.’ And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of
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