Command module astronaut saw less of Moon landing than TV viewers on Earth
Michael Collins was a man on the edge of history. He flew 383,000 kilometres to the Moon in 1969 but was fated to wait anxiously from a distance of 90km as his fellow astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, took humanity’s first steps on the lunar surface.
For three days Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins flew together in the command module, Columbia. Then, on July 21, their paths diverged. As the third member of Nasa’s Apollo 11 mission, Collins’ duty was to pilot Columbia as it kept orbit over the Moon and waited for the lunar module to return.
If Aldrin and Armstrong at times struggled with the weight of their achievement and celebrity, Collins, too, did not have an easy time back on Earth.
‘‘I’m one of the few who didn’t get to see the first men walking on the Moon. The spacecraft didn’t even have a television set,’’ he ruefully recalled. His role was, ironically, the result of a ‘‘promotion’’: Nasa wanted an experienced man to pilot the command module.
As a result, the triumphal procession of the astronauts through the United States, with its round of receptions and presentations, became a strain. Collins, who has died aged 90, poured scorn on the idea that he should be treated as a hero. He was, he insisted, just a hard-working and lucky man doing a job, albeit an extraordinary one.
A month after the Moon landing he announced that he did not intend to make another space flight. Had he stayed he would have been the favourite to take command of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. No-one has landed on the Moon since.
Waiting for Aldrin and Armstrong to return as he sat alone in Columbia was stressful enough. With radio communications cut off for 48 minutes whenever he flew behind the Moon, he felt a sense of profound solitude.
He was haunted by a fear that the lunar craft, Eagle, would malfunction and strand the pair. ‘‘My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the Moon and returning to Earth alone.’’ He prepared a list of 18 possible contingency plans in the event of a problem. He called it his ‘‘Solo Book’’, and it ran to 117 pages.
Michael Collins was born in 1930 in Rome, where his father was on an army posting. He was educated at St Albans School, Washington, and the US Military Academy, West Point. He was then commissioned into the US Air Force, and served as an experimental flight test officer at Edwards Air Force Base in California, relishing the chance to try the latest technology. He ultimately attained the rank of major-general.
Inspired by John Glenn’s 1962 feat of becoming the first American to orbit Earth, and with his fitness improved by giving up smoking, the following year he was selected as a member of the third group of astronauts by Nasa and was named back-up pilot of the Gemini 7 mission.
By the time he was selected for the Apollo 11 mission, Collins was the most experienced of the three astronauts. He had been the first man to have crossed from one vehicle to another in space, using a handheld, nitrogen-propelled ‘‘jet gun’’ during the Gemini 10 space mission of July 1966.
From the moment of Eagle’s separation from Columbia on July 21, 1969, Collins was to see far less of the Apollo mission than anyone glued to a television screen on Earth. In the event, everything went smoothly. Having spent more than 21 hours on the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin re-entered the lunar module and took off to rendezvous and safely dock with Collins and Columbia. Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific on July 24.
In 1970 Collins was given the job of assistant secretary of state for public affairs during President Nixon’s administration. Then he was director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington between 1971 and 1978. He married Patricia in France in 1957 after they met on an airbase there, where Collins was working for the US Air Force and she had a civilian military job. She died in 2014. They had two daughters and a son.
Collins was an accomplished watercolourist and took part in mini-triathlons into his 80s. He was also a wine buff, on a quest for ‘‘a really good bottle of cabernet under $10’’.
In his eloquent book Carrying the Fire, first published in 1975, he wrote that his strongest memory of the Apollo 11 mission was viewing Earth from afar: ‘‘I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced.
‘‘The Earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.’’
He never lost a sense of wonder: ‘‘I’ll be out at night and I’ll see a nice Moon, and say, ‘Hey, that looks good.’ Then I’ll say, ‘Oh shit, I went up there one time!’ Kind of surprises me. It’s like there are two moons, you know – the one that’s usually around, and then that one.’’ –
‘‘My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the Moon and returning to Earth alone.’’