Thursday, April 29, 2021

RIP Michael Collins (1930–2021)

One of my late father's most common aphorisms was "Nobody's getting any younger" – not exactly deep wisdom but true nonetheless. I crossed the half-century mark a couple of years ago and I find myself saying the same thing regularly. It sometimes feels as if scarcely a day goes by without something or someone from my childhood fading from the Earth. I feel that more keenly one some days than on others. Yesterday was one of those days, when I heard the news that Major General Michael Collins had died.

Collins was the least famous of the of the Apollo 11 astronauts. Unlike either Neil Armstrong or Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Collins never set foot on the Moon. Instead, he stayed behind, piloting the command module, Columbia. During the 21 hours when Armstrong and Aldrin were on the lunar surface, Collins was alone – "Not since Adam has any human known such solitude" stated the mission logs. Every revolution of Columbia's orbit around the Moon included 48 minutes when Collins was completely out of contact with Mission Control. I cannot begin to imagine what that must have been like, though Collins said he felt neither fear nor loneliness. 

As a child of the 1970s, the Apollo program loomed large in my imagination. Like nearly every boy I knew, I wanted to be an astronaut. I read everything on the subject of space exploration I could find. One of my prize possessions was a collection of photographic prints of the Apollo 11 mission my uncle got for me. I used to pull them out and stare out them, imagining what it must be like to be free of the bonds of this world and to set foot on another. I remember, too, the Apollo-Soyuz mission of July 1975 and the celebrated "handshake in space." What a heady time to be a child!

The news of Collins's death reminded me of all of this, along with the quote by Gary Gygax that roleplayng games appeal to people nowadays because there are no adventures left in this world. That's probably a little overblown, but only a little. Certainly, there's nothing right now to compare to the grand adventure of the Apollo program and the hopes it engendered in my generation that we might one day have a permanent presence on the Moon and beyond. Those dreams were fueled in large part because of men like Michael Collins, whose courage and fortitude truly deserve to be remembered for all time. 

Godspeed, General Collins.

12 comments:

  1. His autobiography, Carrying the Fire, is well worth a read. Curiously, he said that the most 'threatened' he ever felt was not on top of the Saturn rocket but during training in test pilot school, where 11 men died during in the 22 week course.

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    1. That's fascinating. I'll add his autobiography to the queue of others I need to read. For some reason, I seem to have a lot more time on my hands lately.

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    2. Carrying the Fire is a wonderful memoir. Collins was just as interested in the arts and humanities as he was in science and engineering, and it shows in the work.

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  2. Michael Collins and the other five men who stayed in the orbiters instead of walking on the Moon are to be envied. The twelve men who walked upon the Moon never had time to simply breath deeply and marvel at it. No. Their time on the surface was scheduled down to the minute. But Collins? He got to spend hours upon hours gazing upon and photographing the Moon's wonders and mysteries. I think those six men experienced more of the Moon's magic than anyone else in history.

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  3. I was amazed and saddened at some point during the last year when I realized that no one who has walked on the moon is younger than my father. I barely remember seeing a moon walk on television, I was so young.

    I just finished reading the “Strange Gods” collection edited by Roger Elwood. In general it’s not a great collection. But there was a really nice story by a “James Howard” called “The Director”.

    “…nobody lives anymore. When death was inevitable, people took chances. They filled their lives because their time was short. Now they’re afraid to move. They’ve been promised immortality and they’re afraid of being cheated out of it. People once went to the moon and the planets, but not anymore.”

    The book came out in 1974, and I don’t think these are reprints (there’s no indication one way or another). Which means that at the time the author was likely writing that story, there had been six manned landings, all in the period of 1969 through 1972.

    I wonder if, when he submitted this story, he realized they were all done, that there wouldn’t be any more probably in his lifetime. (Probably, because I haven’t been able to track down who James Howard is. ISFDB lists only this story under his name.)

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    1. I checked and learned that there are now only four men still alive who have walked on the Moon.

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    2. That's bizarre. I'm hard pressed to think of another time in human history when a new land was reached and then no one bothered to set foot on it again for 50 years.

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    3. My father was fond of saying that if there were oil on the Moon, we'd have had a base there decades ago.

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    4. NASA will have manned missions to Luna by 2024 through the Artemis program, with an eye toward establishing more permanent facilities up there for future scientific research. So there's a new generation coming, and soon.

      Pure economics are unlikely to ever drive Lunar exploration. We got there in the first place largely due to the rivalry between the USSR and the USA, and we're looking at the Moon and Mars now in part because tensions are rising again - with a wider cast of players this time around.

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    5. Here's hoping that's true. I have my doubts it'll happen.

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  4. The 2019 documentary "Apollo 11" is an absolute must-see. "Never-before-seen footage and audio recordings take you straight into the heart of NASA's most celebrated mission as astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins embark on a historic trip to the moon."

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