As a measure of sheer coolness just consider: Charles Lindbergh wrote the forward to this book. And not just a few pro forma words about courage and exploration, but rather an almost lyrical text, slowly building to metaphysical aspects of cognition and human destiny. Mind, mindspace, metaverse, magic.
Michael Collins was of course the command module pilot of Apollo 11, the guy who waited in orbit while Aldrin and Armstrong ventured down to the surface. In the public sphere he’s much less famous than those other two guys, but I doubt he cares about that. To me Collins has always come across as the one member of the Apollo 11 crew who surmounted the instant legend accolades and decades of myth-building, and this un-ghosted autobiography (written in 1974!) may illustrate why. It’s a fairly thick book but is exceedingly engaging, funny and informative.
Collins (”The seventeenth American to fly in space!”) likes to say that he’s “lucky”, and shares a variety of wry observations on the “superachiever” caricature often masking the first ranks of astronauts. Right away it becomes clear that this is not just another dry, ego-stroking Apollo hagiography.
Thus the expected horror tales of obsessive NASA medical testing/experimentation are heavily spiced with snarky asides: “What are inkblots supposed to be anyway? Is one crotch in the pictures too many?”.
Among these blunt and refreshing descriptions are summaries of his contemporary cohort, Glenn, Cooper, Borman, Armstrong, Aldrin etc. At one time these were all Real People rather than superhero comic-book characters, and Collins does them great justice by getting a jump on the accretions of history. Like in his relation of hanging out with Buzz Aldrin: “Heavy man, heavy.” … “If you don’t understand what Buzz is talking about today you will tomorrow or the next day.”
(gotta love the 70’s patter, as distinctive as bell-bottoms!)
Of course this is a biography, and there is the usual biographical material, ranging from childhood, military service, the heyday of Edwards Air Force Base and the X-15 era, accounts of survival training and a great description of the physical demands of the Gemini 7 potty procedures.
I especially like the you-are-there descriptions of the spaceflights. Some of the most vivid are of course, from the Apollo 11 mission: Collins waiting alone there in lunar orbit, with the lights turned all the way up, monitoring the instruments and toiling with the Apollo on-board computer (”…my own personal hairshirt.”) as the Eagle sits on the surface. Then, sweating it out while waiting to see if the LM will fire up and return Aldrin & Armstrong. Apart from the obvious tragedy and loss of his friends if that fragile lander had failed, Michael Collins was confronted with himself, fearing that in case of such a disaster he would return to the Earth as “…a marked man” for the rest of his life. But, the hardware worked, the software worked and those fantastically-capable men steered for home and the aftermath of it all. Like the others, Collins returned to acheivements, awards and fables. Just another regular, everyday lucky guy.
He concludes the book with a coda to the Lindbergh intro, admitting a kind of sad bemusement at depredations of space and other “challenge budgets” and calling for global thinking in recognition of the tiny blue marble we all share.
Like many of those early pioneers who first saw the stark isolation and fragility of the Earth, he suggests taking world leaders up to 100K miles so they can see the isolation and uniqueness of our home. The four decades of political history since then makes me doubt that most of them would care, but Collins did not let such facile cynicism poison his outlook.
He Closes with a hope that we will visit Mars within his lifetime and with messages of unity and environmental advocacy. Just a marvelous, wonderful book. Highly reccomended.
Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys 1974