Panel remembers ‘really big deal’
Astronauts discuss historic landing, their place in history, humanity’s next leap
No one ever asks Collins about the mice.
When he, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from their trip to the moon 50 years ago this summer, they were quarantined for 21 days with a “huge colony” of white mice who had the crucial role of ensuring the astronauts hadn’t brought back some deadly lunar virus — and could safely return to society.
“Whether we had a wonderful successful flight or something that was a total disaster for humanity depended on the health of those white mice,” Collins said at a panel of Apollo astronauts Tuesday ahead of a gala in Cocoa Beach. Michael
It’s the one thing that after five decades of fielding all sorts of questions — Did he wish he’d landed on the moon? (No, he declined an opportunity to fly on Apollo 17.) Was he lonely up there, while Aldrin and Armstrong were on the surface? (Also no, he had hot coffee while he waited.) — that he wishes he’d get asked more about.
The mice were perhaps particularly on his mind, Collins said, because he was reading John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” at the time. Maybe they should have sent the mice before the men, he thought.
Collins, Apollo flight director Gerry Griffin, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke all reflected on the monumental anniversary at an event at the Hilton Cocoa Beach on Tuesday afternoon, part of a week of events leading up to the anniversary of the moon landing Saturday.
At the time, said Duke, who worked as the capsule communicator on Apollo 11 before heading to the moon on Apollo 16, everyone was so focused on the task at hand that they didn’t stop much to contemplate its place in history.
He said he never heard anyone saying they were “going to be famous” when it was over. “It’s hard to believe now 50 years later it’s a really big deal,” he said.
But it was — and it’ll be particularly challenging to replicate. Without the backdrop of the Cold War former President John F. Kennedy’s brand of leadership and vision, the nation will have to really rally around a “big goal” to achieve another Apollo, Schweickart said.
Will it be another lunar landing, as President Donald Trump’s administration and NASA is planning for 2024? Will it be skipping all of that and going straight to Mars, as Collins advocates for? Will it be something else?
“It can’t be an incremental step,” Schweickart said. “It’s going to be something which taps pretty deeply into the human psyche.”
For his part, Collins believes Mars is humanity’s next destination.
“When I came back from [the moon on] Apollo 11, I used to joke that they had sent me to the wrong place,” Collins said.
He acknowledged that Armstrong, who died in 2012 and who he called “a lot better engineer that I am,” believed there was still a lot to be explored on the lunar surface — and he agrees.
But “with order of magnitude as a target, I would propose a JFK Mars Direct of some kind,” he said.
To do it, the nation, which is already divided on what the next space-related course of action should be, and Congress, which has to approve multi-billion-dollar increases to NASA’s budget to make it a reality, need to align behind the understanding that exploring space is critical for humans as a species, the panel said.
“I don’t want to live with a lid over my head. I want to remove that lid, I want [us to be] outward bound,” Collins said. “That’s where I want to go.”
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