Lake Worth man and former Apollo astronaut is turning over camera to Smithsonian.

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell is turning over a camera he brought back from the moon 40 years ago to give it a shot at glory in the Smithsonian Institution.

Rather than continue to fight the government in court, the 80-year-old suburban Lake Worth man said he agreed to relinquish the 16-millimeter camera he still believes is rightfully his.

"I'm glad it's out of the way and done," he said of the lawsuit the U.S. government filed against him in June. "It's an acceptable solution."

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However, he said, he didn't steal the camera, as government attorneys alleged. Had he not grabbed it before he and mission commander Alan Shepard blasted off from the moon in February 1971, it would have been destroyed in the lunar module that was left behind, he said.

"Frankly, none of us former Apollo astronauts understand it at all," he said. But, he said, fighting the government promised to be expensive and time consuming.

To end the legal wrangling, he suggested he donate the camera to the Kansas Cosmosphere & Space Center, a Smithsonian-affliated museum in Hutchinson, Kan. However, government attorneys insisted it go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. While he argued that the Smithsonian already has a similar camera and the Cosmosphere doesn't, Mitchell said he finally relented.

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The lawsuit began when government officials discovered he was trying to sell the camera through a New York City auction house.

While government attorneys don't talk about lawsuits, in court papers filed earlier this month to officially close the case, they alerted U.S. District Judge Daniel Hurley that they had recovered the camera that is now destined for the Smithsonian.

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Mitchell, who is the father of West Palm Beach City Commissioner Kimberly Mitchell, said he decided to sell the camera to pay the medical bills of his 26-year-old son, Adam, who died of cancer in October 2010. The auction house, Bonhams, estimated it would fetch $80,000.

The estimate may have been low. A name tag Mitchell wore when he walked on the moon sold for $59,750 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas last year.

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Mitchell said he doesn't understand why the sale of the camera so inflamed government attorneys. He and other astronauts have given away and sold other mementos that were given to them from their moon missions.

"This whole thing, frankly, seems to be some young new lawyer in the organization trying to make a name for himself," he said. "It's been frustrating."