Michael Collins, pilot of Apollo 11 command module, dies at 90

Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 command module in orbit above the moon while his crew mates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, became the first men to walk on the lunar surface, died Wednesday. He was 90. His daughter, Ann Starr, told the Washington Post that she and her sister had cared for him at his home in Marco Island, Florida. He had cancer and died at a hospice facility in Naples, Florida, she told the Post.

When the lunar module Eagle, descending from Columbia, touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969, Collins lost contact with his crew mates and with NASA, his line of communication blocked as he passed over the moon’s far side. It was a blackout that would occur during a portion of each orbit he would make.

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life,” he wrote in re-creating his thoughts for his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.”

Collins left NASA a year after the Apollo 11 mission. He became director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1971, was appointed undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1978 and was named vice president of the LTV Aerospace and Defense Co. in 1980. He later formed a Washington-based consulting firm.

He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1982 as a major general.

Collins’ wife, Patricia Collins, a social worker, died in 2014.

In July 1966, Collins teamed with John W. Young in a three-day mission on Gemini 10. They docked with an Agena rocket that had lifted off before them from Cape Canaveral. Their Gemini spacecraft remained linked with the Agena for more than 38 hours in the first significant test of the docking technique to be employed by Columbia and Eagle.

In addition to “Carrying the Fire,” he was the author of “Liftoff: The Story of America’s Adventure in Space” (1988), and he described a hypothetical journey in “Mission to Mars” (1990).

In “Carrying the Fire,” Collins wrote, “I have been places and done things you simply would not believe. I feel like saying: I have dangled from a cord a hundred miles up; I have seen the earth eclipsed by the moon, and enjoyed it. I have seen the sun’s true light, unfiltered by any planet’s atmosphere. I have seen the ultimate black of infinity in a stillness undisturbed by any living thing.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS 1969 Apollo 11 command module pilot astronaut Michael Collins takes a break June 19, 1969, during training for the moon mission at what was then called Cape Kennedy in Florida. Collins died Wednesday.