Michael Collins obit

Michael Collins, 1930-2021

 

He was not on the list.

The Eagle had landed. On the surface of the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were safing the lunar module and preparing for their ensuing historic exploration of the surface. In orbit 69 miles above, the command-service module Columbia, with Michael Collins aboard, whipped behind the lunar horizon at 3,600 miles per hour. For the next 48 minutes, Collins was alone, cut off from his colleagues on the other side of the moon and back on Earth.

“Not since Adam has any human known such solitude,” declared NASA’s Mission Control, but Collins experienced it “not as fear or loneliness — but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars, and that is all.” In his 1974 biography, Carrying The Fire, Collins related that he was more concerned about the prospect of Eagle failing to ascend, stranding his partners on the lunar surface for eternity. “My secret terror … has been leaving them on the Moon and returning to Earth alone … I will be a marked man for life, and I know it.”

If Collins was “the forgotten man” of Apollo 11, it was by his own design. Collins, who died on April 28 at the age of 90, dutifully performed the public acts required of a person who had achieved unfathomable distinction, but in a manner that defied conventionality. His preface to the final, 2019 edition of Carrying The Fire spends only a paragraph lamenting the recent deaths of his wife and Armstrong but runs on for pages detailing the technical and political challenges of landing on Mars, a lifelong ambition he knew he would not live to see. His speeches to students often veered into the esoteric details of modern aeronautic science and engineering rather than a rote rehashing of how it felt to be launched into outer space.

Collins was born in 1930 to a U.S. Army family in Italy and moved about constantly as a child but was fortunate enough to attend the prestigious St. Albans School when his father received a semi-permanent posting in Washington, D.C., and then the United States Military Academy at West Point. Wishing to avoid accusations of career favoritism, he switched to Air Force Flight School and became an experimental test pilot. Inspired by John Glenn, Collins applied to become an astronaut in 1962. He was eliminated from contention in the final cut of that year’s competition but tried again and, in 1963, was accepted into the third group selected by NASA.

In those early days of manned space exploration, astronauts received a rigorous education in various sciences and engineering and were active partners with contractors in developing their capsules. Collins became an expert in pressure suits and extravehicular excursions, knowledge that served him well when he became the third American to walk in space as part of the demanding Gemini 10 mission. Originally slated to be on the crew of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the moon, a combination of untimely astronaut deaths and his own lengthy recovery from a back injury shuffled him to the historic Apollo 11 flight.

Unlike his crewmate Buzz Aldrin, who chafed at not being first to set foot on the moon, Collins never showed any jealousy or regret regarding his role as command module pilot on Apollo 11 and, by contrast, emphasized the importance of what he did on the mission. He was responsible for navigation, which primarily was done by computer, but the crew had to be prepared for technical failures, plus docking and undocking, which was done manually and could quickly result in the end of a mission if an error was made. Collins’s familiarity with the capsule came in handy as he had to act quickly to avoid gimbal lock and fix a coolant problem while orbiting alone in Columbia.

After Collins’s return to Earth, Astronaut Office Manager Donald Slayton told him he could command a later Apollo mission and walk on the moon himself, but Collins did not want to wait for a later mission that might never happen. Collins first served as assistant secretary for public affairs in the Nixon State Department and then had a successful run as director of the Smithsonian Institution Air and Space Museum, supervising the movement of the revered collection to its current location on the National Mall.

The peripatetic former astronaut went on to get a business degree from Harvard University, became president of an aerospace company in 1980, and later opened a consulting firm before retiring in the late 1990s. Collins was blessed with a long retirement, in which, in keeping with his wide-ranging interests, he wrote, fished, painted, and made himself available to students and groups. Collins explored life and the universe in wonder and awe to his final days, and his appreciation of them ensured he was never alone.