Collins Astronaut Quotes

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 knows what on this side.

I am also planning to leave a lot of things undone. Part of life's mystery depends on future possibilities, and mystery is an elusive quality which evaporates when sampled frequently, to be followed by boredom. For example, catching various types of fish is on my list of good things to do, but I would be reluctant to rush into it, even if i had the time. I want no part of destroying fishing as a mysterious sport.

We are off! And do we know it, not just because the world is yelling "Lift-off" in our ears, but because the seats of our pants tell us so! Trust your instruments, not your body, the modern pilot is always told, but this beast is best felt. Shake, rattle and roll!

Even more basic, any EVA puts man just one thin, glued-together, rubber membrane away from near-instant death.

Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect fifty-six hundred defects…

Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much a part of what's taking place on the lunar surface. 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. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.

Of course, Apollo was the god who carried the fiery sun across the sky in a chariot. But beyond that, how would you carry fire? Carefully, that's how, with lots of planning and at considerable risk. It is a delicate cargo, as valuable as moon rocks, and the carrier must always be on his toes lest it spill. I carried the fire for six years, and now I would like to tell you about it, simply and directly as a test pilot must, for the trip deserves the telling.

On the return trip, the atmospheric “re-entry corridor,” or zone of survivability, or whatever you wanted to call it, was only forty miles thick, and hitting a forty-mile target from 230,000 miles is like trying to split a human hair with a razor blade thrown from a distance of twenty feet.

A classic case of poor cockpit design is the ejection procedure which used to be in one Air Force trainer. It was a placard listing half a dozen important steps, printed boldly on the canopy rail where the pilot couldn’t miss seeing it. The only flaw was that step 1 was “jettison the canopy.

I am also planning to leave a lot of things undone. Part of life's mystery depends on future possibilities, and mystery is an elusive quality which evaporates when sampled frequently, to be followed by boredom. For example, catching various types of fish is on my list of good things to do, but I would be reluctant to rush into it, even if I had the time. I want no part of destroying fishing as a mysterious sport.

At any rate, it was clear that our backup crew would not fly Gemini 10. So when I heard from John Young (he and Gus Grissom had just come off the Gemini 6 backup crew) that he and I were to fly 10, I was overjoyed. I would miss Ed, but I liked John. And besides, I would have flown by myself or with a kangaroo, I just wanted to fly. All that stuff about crew psychological compatibility is crap. Almost anyone can put up with almost anyone else for a clearly defined period of time in pursuit of a mutual objective important to each.

Then it’s time to don a triangular yellow plastic urine bag by inserting the penis into a rubber receiver built into one corner of it. There are three sizes of receivers (small, medium, large), which are always referred to in more heroic terms: extra large, immense, and unbelievable. One selects based on bitter experience in ground tests, where a poor fit in the feet-above-head Gemini seating arrangement means urine trickling up the spine and pooling in the small of the back. “Wetbacks,” the suit technicians call these neophyte astronauts, with displeasure.

As the four of us ascend, I feel that more than the elevator door has clanged shut behind me. I recall that there are one million visitors here to watch the launch, but I feel closer to the moon than to them. This elevator ride, this first vertical nudge, has marked the beginning of Apollo 11, for we cannot touch the Earth any longer.

There is money hanging around, but it is tainted PR money, trading great piles of greenbacks for tiny bits of soul in an undetermined but unsatisfactory ratio. For example, I have been offered $50,000 to do beer commercials, and I love beer, but somehow it seems a grubby thing to do.

Gemini 10 flies no more. We are but awkward trespassers bobbing at the mercy of a new set of experts.

Our trip down into the canyon took nearly the whole day, so we spent the night at a charming inn at the bottom and the next morning those of us who wanted to rented burros for an expedited ascent. I chose to ride, but picked an animal which stopped walking whenever I stopped kicking, so I got as much exercise as if I had been afoot. I also had plenty of time to contemplate the rapid pace at which I was speeding toward the moon. From supersonic jets at Edwards I had progressed all the way to kicking a burro up out of the Grand Canyon.

possibly dangerous

Deke proposed a system which had been used in previous selections, and with minor modifications we agreed. It was a thirty-point system divided equally into three parts: academics, pilot performance, character and motivation. “Academics” was really a misnomer, as an examination of its components will reveal: IQ score—one point; academic degrees, honors, and other credentials—four points; results of NASA-administered aptitude tests—three points; and results of a technical interview—two points. Pilot performance broke down into: examination of flying records (total time, type of airplane, etc.)—three points; flying rating by test pilot school or other supervisors—one point; and results of technical interview—six points. Character and motivation was not subdivided, but the entire ten-point package was examined in the interview, and the victim’s personality was an important part of it. Hence, of the thirty points (the maximum a candidate could earn), eighteen could be awarded during the all-important interview. My recollection is that we spent an hour per man, using roughly forty-five minutes to quiz him and fifteen in a postmortem. We sat all day long in a stuffy room in the Rice Hotel, interviewing from early morning to early evening, for one solid week.

As we got busier and busier, we paid less and less attention to the mail, and I have since met more than one friend who clearly felt that I had gotten so big for my britches that I had chosen to ignore his heartfelt message. Most of the messages were pretty straightforward, but there were a few weirdos in the bunch. One poor man, obviously deranged, wrote from Israel, enclosing reams of data on the gigantic ants that infested the moon. It would be disaster, he pointed out, for the LM to come down on or near one of these anthills, and he would be happy to provide us with his detailed maps showing the location of each hill—for a price, of course.

9. Pilots worry about how their call signs will sound over the radio, which does not transmit either the very high or the very low frequencies in the human voice. This slight alteration sometimes renders a familiar sound unrecognizable. I remember well one fighter group call sign, “Flit Gun,” which was always misunderstood by ground controllers when transmitted by the squeaky voice of our excitable group commander. “Roger, Six Gun,” they would say, and he would tartly reply, “No, it’s Flit Gun.” “Roger, Six Gun.” That would destroy him. “No, goddamn it, Flit Gun! Flit! Flit!” It was a pleasure to fly in his formation and share these military moments.

For a while, NASA discussed leaving a flag from each UN member nation, and at MSC a Christmas-tree-type stand had been built which, when opened, displayed all the flags in a colorful cone. However, the screams from Congress in opposition to this scheme caused NASA quickly to back away from the idea. I agreed with the Congress, since the landing was being financed by the American taxpayers alone, and I felt they were entitled to one show of nationalism amid the international totems.

More recent Gemini graduates, Stafford and I were the newcomers, but Tom seemed to be a swifter study than I. He had been number one in his class in electrical engineering at the Naval Academy, and he sopped up wiring diagrams with the same ease with which some teenage girls memorize the words of popular songs.

I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. 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.

The plaque which was to be left on the moon, bolted to a leg of the LM, was another matter. “Here Men From Planet Earth/ First Set Foot Upon The Moon/July 1969 A.D./We Came In Peace For All Mankind,

Finally, I must say that below the threshold of fear for life and limb there lurks a similar emotion, perhaps not fear but at least apprehension, a worry, not that you are going to be killed, but that you will be terribly embarrassed.

If we want to change course, it’s as simple as ABC. We just get Roger Chaffee’s tracking network to send up a state vector and a couple of other things to Dave Scott’s computer, which feeds pointing commands through Dick Gordon’s instrument panel to Donn Eisele’s controls, which cause Walt Cunningham’s electricity to power Gene Cernan’s engines, which fire, to get us out of Bill Anders’s radiation zone into the position called for by Buzz Aldrin’s flight plan. The rest of you guys must be loafing!

TLI was what made this flight different from the six Mercury, ten Gemini, and one Apollo flights that had preceded it, different from any trip man had ever made in any vehicle. For the first time in history, man was going to propel himself past escape velocity, breaking the clutch of our earth's gravitational field and coasting into outer space as he had never done before. After TLI there would be three men in the solar system who would have to be counted apart from all the other billions, three who were in a different place, whose motion obeyed difterent rules, and whose habitat had to be considered a separate planet. The three could examine the earth and the earth could examine them, and each would see the other for the first time.

My computer had been equipped with a slightly different program which M.I.T. called Colossus IIA; it was aptly named. I felt flea-sized in its presence, and punched the computer keys with a good deal of reverence, as I availed myself of the services of this giant. That is, until it and I started to disagree and it refused to give me the answers I sought. Then I lost my temper. Flash an “operator error” light at me, will you, you stupid goddamned computer, and I would sputter and stammer until the soothing voice of Tom Wilson14 or one of the other instructors came over the earphones and unctuously explained how I had offended their precocious brat.

In all likelihood, however, I would have been back-up commander of Apollo 14 and would have walked the moon on 17, the last of the series. But in June 1969 I couldn’t even count to seventeen, nor do I have any regrets today over the decision … Still, I watched Gene Cernan with more than average interest during that flight three and a half years later.

Apollo 13 was launched on 11 April 1970. It was to become the third manned spacecraft to land on the Moon, with a mission to explore formations near the 80 km (50 mile) wide Fra Mauro crater. The flight was commanded by James A. Lovell with John L. ‘Jack’ Swigert as Command Module pilot and Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module pilot. There was a small problem on takeoff when an engine shut down two minutes early during the second stage boost. But four other engines burned longer to compensate, and the craft reached orbit successfully. Then, on 14 April 1970, nearly sixty hours into the mission, the astronauts were 321,860 km (199,995 miles) from Earth when they heard a loud bang.

The explosion At first the crew thought a meteoroid had hit them. As well as the noise of an explosion, the electrics were going haywire and the attitude control thrusters had fired. In fact, a short circuit had ignited some insulation in the Number 2 oxygen tank of the Service Module. The Service Module provided life support, power and other systems to the Command Module, which held the astronauts as they travelled to and from lunar orbit. The Lunar Module was a separate, though connected, craft that would be used to ferry the men to the lunar surface and back. The fire caused a surge in pressure that ruptured the tank, flooding the fuel cell bay with gaseous oxygen. This surge blew the bolts holding on the outer panel, which tore off free and spun into space, damaging a communications antenna. Contact with Earth was lost for 1.8 seconds, until the system automatically switched to another antenna. The shock also ruptured a line from the Number 1 oxygen tank. Two hours later all of the Service Module’s oxygen supply had leaked into the void. As the Command Module’s fuel cells used oxygen with hydrogen to generate electricity, it could now only run on battery power. The crew had no option but to shut down the Command Module completely and move into the Lunar Module. They would then use this as a ‘lifeboat’ for the journey back to Earth before rejoining the Command Module for re-entry. As for the mission, the Service Module was so badly damaged that a safe return from a lunar landing was impossible. These men would not be landing on the Moon. 320,000 km from home The Flight Director immediately aborted the mission. Now he just had to get the men home. The quickest way would be a Direct Abort trajectory, using the Service Module engine to essentially reverse the craft. But it was too late:

Power levels were dropped so low that even voice communications were difficult. Removing carbon dioxide from the air was another serious problem. Lithium hydroxide normally did the job but there wasn’t enough of it. The only additional supply they had was in the Command Module, and its canisters were cube-shaped whereas the Lunar Module’s sockets were cylindrical. It looked like the men would suffocate before they made it back. In one of the most inspired brainstorming sessions of all time, engineers on the ground got out all the kit that the crew would have available. They then improvised a ‘mailbox’ that would join the two incompatible connections and draw the air through. The air was becoming more poisonous with every breath as the astronauts followed the meticulous radio instructions to build the Heath Robinson repair. Amazingly, it worked. They would have enough clean air. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. They needed to re-enter the atmosphere in the Command Module, but it had been totally shut down to preserve its power. Would it start up again? Its systems hadn’t been designed to do this. Again, engineers and crew on the ground had to think on their feet if their friends were to live. They invented an entirely new protocol that would power the ship back up with the limited power supply and time available without blowing the system. They also feared that condensation in the unpowered and freezing cold Command Module might damage electrical systems when it was reactivated. It booted up first time. Back to Earth with a splash With Apollo 13 nearing Earth, the crew jettisoned the Service Module and photographed the damage for later analysis. Then they jettisoned the redundant Lunar Module, leaving them sitting tight in the Command Module Odyssey as they plunged into the atmosphere.

certainly had had no childhood dream of flying to the moon or anywhere else, but the idea was damned appealing, it had been endorsed by the President,* and it beat the barrier four ways to Sunday.

The earth from orbit is a delight—alive, inviting, enchanting—offering visual variety and an emotional feeling of belonging “down there.” Not so with this withered, sun-seared peach pit out my window. There is no comfort to it; it is too stark and barren; its invitation is monotonous and meant for geologists only. Look at this crater, look at that one, are they the result of impacts, or volcanism, or a mixture of both?

After tonight, there will still be bad things going on all over the world. There will still be Vietnam. There will still be all kinds of bad things. Even in my own house. But you and the other astronauts, tonight you give us hope that miracles can happen and things can get better and we can all come together to want the same good thing. You give us hope. Sleep tight Michael Collins.