Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins dies

American astronaut Michael Collins, who flew the Apollo 11 command module while his crewmates became the first people to land on the Moon on July 20, 1969, died on Wednesday after battling cancer, his family said. “Mike always faced the challenges of life with grace and humility, and faced this, his final challenge, in the same way,” Collins’s family said. Born in Rome in 1930 to a US army officer serving as military attache there, Collins went on to become a fighter pilot with the air force and retired with the rank of Major General. He is best known for being a member of the Apollo 11 mission when his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the Moon. “When we rolled out and looked at (the Moon), oh, it was an awesome sphere,” he said at a 2019 event.

Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, who piloted the spaceship from which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left to make their historic first steps on the Moon in 1969, died on Wednesday from cancer, his family said. He was 90.

Collins, often referred to as the “forgotten astronaut”, was part of the three-man Apollo 11 crew that effectively ended the space race between the US and Russia and fulfilled then president John F Kennedy’s challenge to reach the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

Though he travelled some 238,000 miles to the moon and came within 69 miles, Collins never set foot on the lunar surface like his crewmates Aldrin and Armstrong, who died in 2012. None of the men flew in space after that mission.

“It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand,” Collins had said on the 10th anniversary of the Moon landing in 1979.