Former NASA official and member of Apollo navigation team is found dead in Thailand with a rope tied around his neck and crotch

A retired NASA official who served on the Apollo Navigation Team has been found dead with a rope around his neck and genitals inside a home in Thailand, it emerged today.

Police found the body of Paul Milford Muller, 76, on Tuesday in the Tak Province of the country and suspect he had been dead for about three days.

Police Col Ekarat Intasueb, chief of Mae Sot police station, said there was a rope tied around his genitals and waist and another tied around his neck, which was hanging from the knob of his bedroom door.

Mysterious: Paul Milford Muller was found with a rope tied around his genitals and waist and another rope tied around his neck, hanging from a knob of his bedroom door in Thailand Police: Col Ekarat Intasueb, chief of Mae Sot police station (pictured), said there was a rope tied around his genitals and waist and another tied around his neck, which was hanging from the knob of his bedroom door

Equipment for injecting crystal meth, five methamphetamine pills and several sex toys were also found in the room.

Author: He wrote three books, including one called Suicide Inc, which he described as a 'romantic and erotic thriller'

There were no signs that Muller, 76, had been assaulted, according to the Bangkok Post.

He appeared to have died from asphyxiation or from a heart attack after a drug overdose, police said.

His body has been sent for an autopsy while officials try to contact his family.



Muller worked for ten years at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and served on the Apollo Navigation Team.

He wrote three books, including one called Suicide Inc., which he described as a 'romantic and erotic thriller'. On the cover of the novel is a picture of a noose.



He grew up in Los Angeles and had a PhD in Physics/Astronomy.



Muller had recently joined Twitter and last posted on April 19.

On his bio on his website he states: 'I write for personal enjoyment and work diligently to share with others. I respect readers and accept that you are the true judges of what we do.



'I live alone in the highlands of Thailand, but have many interesting Thai friends.'

According to his publishing company's website, Muller was single, and 'lived with a mature family with whom he had a relationship for some years, in a modern home in the Thai style that he built on the outskirts of a farming village near Nakhon Sawan'.

Muller is the joint recipient of the Magellanic Premium Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society (APS), which is often described as the 'Nobel Prize' for navigation.



'THE GOAL OF LANDING A MAN ON THE MOON AND BRINGING HIM SAFELY BACK TO EARTH': THE APOLLO MISSION

Paul Muller worked at NASA for more than ten tears and was the co-navigator on the Apollo Navigation Team, whose missions included eight separate lunar landings.

The Apollo mission ran from 1963 - 1972, The program was the third human spaceflight program carried out by NASA, the United States' civilian space agency which was first conceived during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a three-man spacecraft to follow the one-man Project Mercury which put the first Americans in space. After that President John F. Kennedy said he wanted Apollo to focus on putting a man on the moon and safely bringing him back to earth. He told Congress on May 25, 1961: 'I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

'No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.'

The first manned flight of Apollo was in 1968 and it succeeded in landing the first humans on Earth's Moon from 1969 through 1972. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, with Michael Collins remaining in lunar orbit in the spacecraft, five Apollo missions landed astronauts on the moon after that, the last in 1972. In these six spaceflights, 12 men walked on the Moon.

Apollo set several major human spaceflight milestones. It stands alone in sending manned missions beyond low Earth orbit - Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, while the final Apollo 17 mission marked the sixth Moon landing and the ninth manned mission beyond low Earth orbit.

The program laid the foundation for NASA's current human spaceflight capability, and funded construction of its Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center. Apollo also spurred advances in many areas of technology incidental to rocketry and manned spaceflight, including avionics, telecommunications, and computers.





