Moon landing: For all mankind
Apollo 11’s pilot Michael Collins reveals his “secret terror” and suicide plan during moon mission.
Fifty years ago, Apollo 11 blasted into space with the goal of landing men on the moon and returning safely to Earth. It was the greatest voyage of discovery undertaken by humankind: an adventure bold and daring, with enormous risk of failure and fatality, that has enthralled and fascinated ever since.
An estimated 650 million people watched in astonishment as the ghostly figures of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in their gleaming white spacesuits planted their boots in the grey, powdery, desolate lunar terrain on July 20, 1969. It was breathtaking in its audacity and implications.
“That’s one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind,” declared Armstrong.
When Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the cratered surface in the lunar module, Michael Collins remained in the command module and disappeared to the far side of the moon. At that moment, and for 48 minutes out of every two hours, he had no contact with his crewmates or mission control in Houston, Texas. Collins was marooned in the vast emptiness of space, described as the loneliest man since Adam.
“I was the loneliest man in the whole history of lonely man,” Collins, 88, tells Inquirer in an exclusive interview marking the anniversary of Apollo 11’s mission. “Apparently nobody had ever been as lonely as I was in that command module. But I thought that was ridiculous.”
Collins felt very much part of what was taking place on the moon. Still, he was isolated from known life — three billion people plus Armstrong and Aldrin on one side of the moon, and Collins “plus God only knows” on the other. He was not lonely or afraid but had a powerful sense of awareness, anticipation and almost exultation. He was among the stars.
Alone in lunar orbit for more than 24 hours, Collins had a “secret terror”: that the landing would fail, killing or trapping Armstrong and Aldrin, and he would have to return to the Earth alone as “a marked man”. He worried that the lunar module, Eagle, might not be able to lift off from the moon’s surface and rendezvous with the command module, Columbia.
“We had one small engine valve that had to ignite to produce full thrust or Neil and Buzz were dead,” Collins morbidly recalls.
“If that had happened there’s nothing I could have done but come home. I did not have any landing gear on my craft, so I could not go down and rescue them.”
With this gloomy scenario on his mind, Collins thought about committing suicide rather than returning to Earth alone. But he quickly dismissed it. “I would have come home with a terrible feeling, and I would have carried that terrible feeling with me for the rest of my life,” he says.
Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins did not discuss the risks. But they each put the chances of success at about 50:50. The sequence of manoeuvres over the eight-day mission was complex. It had, after all, never been done before. They were acutely aware of the dangers. Apollo 1’s crew had been incinerated in an electrical fire while training in January 1967.
US president Richard Nixon had a speech prepared that mourned the death of Armstrong and Aldrin. It was suggested by astronaut Frank Borman, NASA’s liaison with the White House, and drafted by speechwriter William Safire.
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” Nixon would have said. “These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”
The Apollo 11 crew lived with danger every second of their mission. Moments before the huge Saturn V rocket launched them into space, a liquid hydrogen valve leak was discovered. Eagle navigated the moon’s craters and landed on the Sea of Tranquillity with just 16 seconds of fuel to spare.
It took Collins about 850 computer key strokes to program the Columbia-Eagle rendezvous.
The moon landing was the realisation of a goal set by John F. Kennedy in a speech before congress in May 1961. He committed the US to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the end of the decade. It epitomised Kennedy’s idealistic New Frontier and reflected the Cold War space race with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union had stunned the world with the launch of its Sputnik satellite in October 1957. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in April 1961. US prestige was wounded and the Soviets were perceived to be leading the world in science and technology. Alan Shepard became the first American to go into space in May 1961, about three weeks after Gagarin.
Following Project Mercury and Project Gemini, Project Apollo was established to take the final strides towards the goal of a moon landing by the end of the 1960s. The program cost a staggering $US25 billion ($US180bn, or $258bn, in today’s value). The Apollo 11 crew members also were to collect rock samples from the moon, carry out scientific experiments, record their activities with photographs and set up a live television camera to broadcast the moonwalk.
NASA weighed carefully the decision to select commander Armstrong, lunar module pilot Aldrin and command module pilot Collins as the crew. It judged that Armstrong had the right temperament to handle being the most famous man on the planet by becoming the first human to set foot on an astronomical body.
Collins says there was nobody better than the cool and modest Armstrong (who died in August 2012) to lead the Apollo 11 mission. He had been a US Navy aviator in the Korean War and a US Air Force test pilot. He joined NASA’s Gemini program in 1962 and commanded the Gemini 8 mission in March 1966.
“Neil was a wonderful man and mission commander,” Collins remembers. “He was the clear choice, a wonderful choice, to be the first person to walk on the moon. Neil had stood out as a premier test pilot, was extraordinarily well qualified, and was a very intelligent man and with a broad field of interests. He was the right guy in the right place at the right time.” Aldrin, in contrast, was brilliant, brash and ambitious. He had served as a USAF fighter pilot in the Korean War. He had a doctorate in aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he had flown in the last Gemini mission in November 1966. “Buzz was extremely well qualified in his own right,” Collins recalls. “He had done very well in school academically and graduated from West Point. He shot down a couple of (Soviet) MiGs in Korea. Then he went into postgraduate work at MIT and his speciality was rendezvous and docking.”
Collins was the third integral member of the crew, all of whom were born in 1930. A fellow West Point graduate, he joined the air force, was a fighter pilot and test pilot, and entered the space program in 1962. He needed not only the same courage and similar skills as Armstrong and Aldrin, but also a quality of mind and disposition to be in that command module alone with responsibilities just as crucial as those of his crewmates.
“So you had this one man, Neil Armstrong, the best qualified of all our test pilots, and then you had Buzz Aldrin with a doctorate from MIT in rendezvous and docking,” he says. “They were a wonderful team and I felt very fortunate to be the third man in that group.”
The three-man Apollo 11 crew was announced on January 9, 1969. Collins designed the patch they would wear on their spacesuits. It pictured a bald eagle clutching an olive branch, representing peace, hovering above the moon, with the Earth in the background. It would serve as the official emblem for the mission.
Apollo 11 launched at 9.32am (Eastern Daylight Time) on July 16, 1969 from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
Collins was stunned when he saw Earth from space for the first time as part of the two-man Gemini 10 mission with John Young in July 1966. It is always the sight of Earth, rather than the moon, that draws the eyes of astronauts. On Apollo 11, Collins realised how “fragile” the Earth was as he looked back from the moon’s orbit.
“It was very shiny against a black background — the blue of the oceans, the white of the clouds, a smear of rust being the continents,” he recalls.
“It seemed fragile. We humans are doing so many different things to this fragile Earth and I’m not sure we are doing this in the full knowledge of the consequences, and that concerns me.”
Collin’s memoir, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, was published in 1974. It has been re-released by Pan UK with a new preface to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. Collins recounts his air force career, his selection and training as an astronaut, the Gemini 10 mission, and offers a gripping first-hand account of “orbiting the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on it”. It is the best of the astronaut memoir genre.
A fifth of the world’s population watched the TV broadcast of Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the moon. Collins, though closer to them than anybody else in the universe, missed it as he was in orbit on the other side of the moon. When he regained contact with mission control, he learned the US flag had been lodged on the lunar surface. He listened to Nixon speak to Armstrong and Aldrin from the Oval Office. “It inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earth,” Nixon said. It was heady stuff.
“This voyage is fraught with hazards for the three of us — and especially two of us — and that is about as far as I have gotten in my thinking,” Collins wrote. “In the meantime, I am proprietor of this orbiting men’s room and there are other demands on my time.” The Apollo 11 crew had a mission to complete. As Collins slept for a few hours, Armstrong and Aldrin did the same aboard Eagle. The rendezvous went to plan, despite Collins’s nervousness. “One little hiccup and they are dead men,” he wrote. Collins wanted to kiss Armstrong and Aldrin when they returned to Columbia but, embarrassed, he settled for a firm handshake, a smile and a laugh.
The Apollo 11 crew travelled around the world on a month-long goodwill tour after returning to Earth. Collins remembers spotting Australia with his nose pressed up against Columbia’s windows. They arrived in Australia in October 1969 and visited Perth and Sydney. It also happened to be Collins’s 39th birthday. The crew received boomerangs as gifts, symbolising the first aerodynamic shape conceived by humans.
“I am a big admirer of Australia,” Collins says. “I love your country, I love your people, the way you do business, the kind of things that you value, the geography, the nature, the oceans, the desert stretches, and the beautiful cities. Australia is very high on my list of most desirable countries on this dinky little planet.”
Collins pays tribute to Australia for providing tracking and TV signals for the mission. NASA’s Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station outside Canberra transmitted the first steps on the moon. After 8½ minutes, the CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in the central west of NSW transmitted the remainder of the broadcast.
When Armstrong took those first steps on the moon at 10.56pm (EDT) on July 20 (12.56pm AEST on July 21) — Australians saw it 0.3 seconds before the rest of the planet, which waited for the feed to travel via satellite over the Pacific.
“We were very aware of Australia’s contribution at the time of Apollo 11,” Collins recalls. “No matter which way the Earth was turned there was a gigantic antenna pointed towards us in California, in Spain and, of course, in Australia.”
Asked for the millionth time if he was disappointed not to have walked on the moon, Collins responds as he always has: “I was just delighted to be working with Neil and Buzz in any capacity and to be one-third of the combination that fulfilled John F. Kennedy’s mandate to land a man on the moon.”
The unpretentious Collins seems almost unfussed about the 50th anniversary. He is, though, honoured and thrilled to have been part of the mission. He apologises for not having a better answer than “cool” or “awesome” when asked what it felt like. Some of the other 23 astronauts who have flown to the moon describe it as an emotional experience. Others have turned to the bottle, suffered depression and seen their marriages torn apart.
“I don’t know how I dealt with it,” Collins says. “Poorly, probably, put down poorly.” In truth, he fared better than most, including Armstrong and Aldrin. He was director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum from 1971 to 1978. For 57 years he was married to his adored Patricia, who died in 2014. He lives in Florida and is close to his daughters, Kate and Ann. He fishes, reads, paints and does lots of exercise. He considers himself “lucky, lucky, lucky” in life.
Collins writes that the experience of walking in space twice during the Gemini 10 mission and orbiting the moon on Apollo 11 did have one effect on him. “I didn’t find God on the moon, nor has my life changed dramatically in any other basic way,” he notes. “But although I may feel I am the same person, I also feel that I am different from other people. I have been places and done things that you simply would not believe.”
The moon landing remains one of the greatest moments in the history of humankind. For one brief shining moment, people came together to share in the greatest adventure ever undertaken. It is why Apollo 11 continues to amaze and astound each new generation.
“I thought that wherever we went people would say, ‘Wow the Americans did it — congratulations,’ ” Collins recalls. “I was absolutely flabbergasted that the unanimous response we got was: ‘We did it. We humans finally left this dinky little planet and went elsewhere. We did this together. We human beings, not you Americans.’ It was an amazing reaction and it is the thing that I most love about Apollo 11.”
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