The Apollo 11 pilot who was all alone in space

Michael Collins 1930–2021

For three and a half hours on July 20, 1969, Michael Collins was the loneliest man in the universe. As pilot of the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia, Collins orbited the moon at 3,700 mph while astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic first steps 60 miles below. “You cats take it easy,” Collins radioed his crewmates as they descended to the lunar surface. Despite his cheerful words, Collins feared Armstrong and Aldrin might never make it back to the Columbia, and he ran repeatedly through the 117-page list of contingencies he’d drawn up in case of disaster. “If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide,” he recalled thinking. “I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life.” His worries never came to pass. The three astronauts splashed into the Pacific on July 24, 1969, and emerged from their craft as national heroes.

Collins was born in Rome, where his father— a major general in the Army—was the military attaché to the U.S. Embassy, said The New York Times. After graduating from West Point, Collins joined the Air Force “to avoid suggestions of nepotism in future assignments.” He became a fighter test pilot, said The Guardian (U.K.), and in 1956 bailed out of a flaming F-86. The experience boosted “his confidence about handling sticky situations.” Applying to NASA after John Glenn’s historic solo orbit of Earth in 1962, Collins blasted off for the first time on Gemini 10 in 1966. He became the first astronaut to emerge twice from a spacecraft during the same mission: once to snap photos from an open hatch and later for a spacewalk to retrieve a scientific device from a floating Gemini 8 rocket.

“A slipped disk in 1968 nearly derailed his astronaut career,” said The Washington Post, but he recovered in time to be tapped for Apollo 11. Content with his status as the mission’s “third man,” Collins retired from NASA in 1970 and went to work at the State Department and then as founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The author of several books, he described the wonders of space flight with a poet’s touch. “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,” he wrote in a 1974 memoir. “I do have this secret, this precious thing, that I will always carry with me.”