Michael Collins – the man on the dark side of the moon
Michael Collins, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90, will be remembered for being forgotten.
Whilst the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin feature prominently in the history of space exploration as the first and second men to walk on the Moon, their crewmate, Collins, is remembered almost in parentheses. It was Collins who stayed in the command module Columbia as his crewmates descended to the lunar surface. It was Collins who would travel alone into the Moon’s umbra. Whereas Armstrong and Aldrin faced the adventure of the moon landing, Collins experienced a different kind of drama, all the more modern because it was psychological in nature. Yet being less remembered is perhaps a legacy he was at peace with. “I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have,” he said in 2009. It was a statement of ordinariness from a man who was far from ordinary.
In the vast and sometimes overwhelming story of America’s space program of the 1960s, Collins’ achievements were, like those of the exceptional people drawn to NASA, vast and overwhelming. He was born in Rome, Italy, in 1930. His father was a military attaché and Collins would follow him into military service. It was a family tradition. After graduating from West Point in 1952, he chose to join the US Air Force. He had been interested in aviation since the age of nine and had first flown at 11. The chance to fly jets was too much to turn down but so too was the chance to forge his own path given that his uncle was already the Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
His career in the air force nearly came to a premature end when he “flunked” the eye exam but passed it on the second attempt after a civilian doctor gave him some eye exercises. After that, his career through the Air Force was characterised by talent in the face of danger. Training fatalities were more of a norm than an exception and, as Tom Wolfe would report it in “The Right Stuff”, “Mike Collins had undergone eleven weeks of combat training at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, and in that eleven weeks twenty-two of his fellow trainees had died in accidents, which was an extraordinary rate of two per week.”
Promoted to Major-General and in the business of testing fighter aircraft, he thought he had the “best job in the world”. That lasted until he saw John Glenn go into space with the Mercury Atlas 6 in 1962. Glenn has been part of the “first group” of seven astronauts (known as “The Seven”) chosen for the Mercury programme and, consequently, inspired the younger Collins into believing his future lay in space. His first attempt to get into the programme came with the second group, known as “The Nine”, that would include Armstrong. They would see through the end of the Mercury and the start of the Gemini programmes. Collins was rejected and suddenly realised his status as test pilot no longer had that “larger than life quality. I knew people in Houston and I envied them.”
The envy did not last long. Alongside Aldrin, he was picked to be one of the fourteen men in the third group, tasked with the biggest challenge of all. They would graduate from Gemini to form the backbone of the crew for the Apollo programme to get to the Moon.
Collins himself first reached space with Gemini 10, when he became the first man to perform two spacewalks in the same mission. He then progressed into the Apollo programme where life was defined by the constant jockeying for seats. He was part of the backup crew for Apollo 2 before it was cancelled, then became the Command Module Pilot for Apollo 8 before back surgery on a cervical disc left him in a neck brace for three months. He was then transferred to Apollo 11. Yet any sense that Collins had “lucked” into the most important mission of all was absent at first. There was no plan for Apollo 11 to become the moon landing mission. That would merely be his fate. Apollo 11 blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on 16 July 1969 and on 19 July entered lunar orbit. The rest, as they say, is history.
After his return to Earth, he declared that he would not go back into space. Instead, he briefly became the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under President Nixon, holding the post from December 1969 to April 1971. He then became Director of the National Air and Space Museum where he remained until 1978.
Yet his greatest contribution after Apollo 11 might well be writing Carrying the Fire, considered the best of the autobiographies by any of the Apollo astronauts. His writings combine a clarity that comes from the direct manner that his engineering training brings to the problems of narration. It is at times sparse but leaves enough room for a succinct awareness of greater themes.
“I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude,” he wrote of being alone in the moon’s shadow. “It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon. I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully – not as fear or loneliness – but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling”.
As a new space industry seeks to push us beyond the Moon, perhaps there’s no testimony that resonates as strongly as this. Michael Collins was the first to feel so isolated, small, and forgotten and, for that alone, he will always be remembered.