[HN Gopher] Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
___________________________________________________________________
Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
Author : edwinbalani
Score : 774 points
Date : 2021-04-28 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| thestoicattack wrote:
| I'm glad his memoir, "Carrying the Fire", got mentioned. It's one
| of the best astronaut memoirs.
| bsdooby wrote:
| Definitively!
| jbperry wrote:
| Wow, I just finished reading Carrying the Fire three days ago.
| Good writer and a great ambassador for the space program.
| aluket wrote:
| I'm half-way through reading this at the moment and I cannot
| recommend it highly enough. In the prologue he talks of being
| able to turn to any page and find something interesting to
| read. He's not wrong.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I believe it was his book where he describes the moon hanging
| there as they were closing in on it. This massive, plaster-of-
| paris sphere almost filling his view.
|
| His description (ignore mine above) made me realize just how
| remarkable that must have been to see. The Earth diminishing to
| a ball is one thing, but this atmosphere-less, white desert,
| Little-Prince-like, moon bearing down on you sounds like
| something else entirely.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| unchocked wrote:
| Clear skies and tailwinds. Can't get back to the Moon fast
| enough, while we still have living continuity to Apollo. Can't
| believe how low the low in our space program has been.
| minikites wrote:
| SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe
| we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA
| instead.
| raverbashing wrote:
| NASA/JPL have an ample history of blowing up experimental
| rockets. Same as the Russians. The Germans had it hard with
| the V2s as well
|
| I'd recommend people to look up into those previous failures
| (and SpaceX is finding "new ways" to fail)
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| lol. I rarely test my code, but when I do, I test it on
| prod.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Unit tests can't catch all bugs ;)
| WalterBright wrote:
| See the book "V2" by Dornberger on all the failures of the
| V2 rockets. Quite a good read.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| NASA seems confident enough in SpaceX's ability to award them
| a contract for Starship to take them back to the moon.
|
| "This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA's
| decision a week ago to award SpaceX--and only SpaceX--a
| contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar
| surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to
| the Moon, could launch as early as 2024."
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/five-reasons-why-
| nas...
| thelean12 wrote:
| SpaceX also blew up a huge amount of their Falcon rockets at
| the beginning too, and now they're consistently bringing
| astronauts to the ISS and payloads into orbit. So I'm not
| sure what your point is.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| I'd rather have them fail their first 9 attempts that each
| take a month before succeeding, than succeeding on the first
| attempt that takes a decade.
|
| Failure during research & development isn't necessarily a bad
| thing.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Occurrence of failures directly correlates to occurrence of
| growth and innovation. SpaceX is (a) innovating very fast,
| and therefore we see lots of failures, (b) _embracing_ those
| failures as opportunities to grow, and (c) installing many
| sensors and collecting a lot of data to maximize the chance
| that they can learn a lot from whatever failures occur.
|
| Make no mistake, if a company or institution isn't trying a
| lot _and failing a lot_ to achieve a new type of goal, it 's
| also not making much progress toward any new type of goal.
| minikites wrote:
| Then why shouldn't we apply this same standard to
| government projects? Any time a government project doesn't
| go perfectly it's used an excuse to scrap the very concept
| of government since "they can't do anything right".
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, the government is free to
| innovate, as long as my daily life (and that of my fellow
| Americans) is not part of what's being experimented with.
| We have the entire corpus of world history to refer to
| for experimental data on government policy -- let's use
| it as much as possible. Social crises aren't worth
| creating for the data they yield.
|
| Regarding technical innovation, NASA did a lot of that in
| the 1960s. There were a lot of failures then (Mercury and
| Gemini programs), followed by incredible success (Apollo
| program). NASA's work with SpaceX is another great form
| of innovation -- pick the most innovative commercial
| partners and move forward.
| derekp7 wrote:
| I love how whenever SpaceX fails to land a booster that I see
| headlines of "SpaceX blows up another rocket", even if it
| still delivered its payload to orbit.
|
| I do wonder, however, where NASA would be if they would have
| continued with the DC-X prototype instead of abandoning it
| when it had a landing leg failure causing it to topple over
| in an early test.
| minikites wrote:
| It's because of Elon's hubris and the ways that hubris is
| baked into the entire institutional culture. I think far
| fewer people would delight in their failures if they showed
| an ounce of humility from any of their mistakes. Instead,
| they continue to make wild eyed proclamations and promises
| of impossible goals, but it's Elon so people continue to
| believe him for some reason.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Great progress comes from Elon's hubris.
|
| > people continue to believe him for some reason.
|
| I believe in him, and the reason is obvious. He gets
| things done nobody else seems able to.
| publicola1990 wrote:
| Last years Chang'e 5 mission was essentially a robotic Apollo
| mission. This decade does look to be promising for Lunar
| exploration.
| aplummer wrote:
| Pictures of Pluto, a helicopter on Mars, I'm more inspired than
| ever by nasa
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| And I love them for it. But I want humans on the Moon again.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| To be fair, the pure scientific impact of the robotic
| missions is probably much higher than human ones (besides
| advances in medical/bioscience). But, placing people on the
| moon probably brings more funding for NASA than robots.
|
| Edit: Both are still extremely cool though
| mandevil wrote:
| To compare the scientific return of robots and people, we
| can compare the results of the only space rock both have
| visited: the Moon. The six manned Apollo missions brought
| back much much much more scientific return than all of
| the contemporary robotic missions. Apollo brought back
| 382 kg of moon rocks. Three Soviet probes (first one,
| Luna 16, between Apollo 12 and 14) brought back a total
| of 326g. While it's a bit facile to claim that's the
| whole difference, I would say that the difference in
| scientific return was at least one order of magnitude, if
| not quite as large as the moon rock numbers.
|
| Now, the Apollo program also cost much more than the
| robotic missions. If you are willing to invest enough
| (e.g. Apollo was >1% of US GDP/year for most of the 60's)
| you can get an enormous amount of scientific return from
| a manned mission, but robots are useful for budgets that
| can't cover a manned mission.
| vkou wrote:
| Bear in mind that the Luna missions were done with 1960s
| Soviet robotics technology... And were only a side-show
| to their goal of a manned landing, which was hamstrung by
| repeated launcher problems. (And as soon as they lost the
| moon race, interest in this immediately dried up on the
| Soviet side - the sample return in the 70s was an
| afterthought.)
|
| If your goal is to plant a flag and ship back ~400 Kg of
| moon rocks, you could do it today, using robots, for a
| tiny fraction of a manned mission's budget. The thing is,
| bringing back 400 Kg of moon rocks is not 400 times more
| valuable than bringing back 1 Kg of moon rocks.
| mandevil wrote:
| Right, but the lunar science was not just limited to
| sample return, and here the J missions (Apollo 15-17)
| with their SIM bay cameras produced much better image
| quality than even Lunar Orbiter for much of the Moon's
| surface (Lunar Orbiter 5, in the polar orbit, was able to
| map parts of the Moon that the J missions never saw.)
| Similarly, the rover's traveled farther than the
| Lunkhod's did, showing us a much greater area of the
| surface. And the most sophisticated scientific instrument
| ever to go to the moon, even today, would be Harrison
| Schmitt, with his Harvard Geology Ph.D brain and hands.
|
| As for "done with 1960's technology" so was Apollo: the
| ability to discover hydrogen (used to find the ice in the
| lunar crater shadows) wasn't possible with 1960's sensors
| that were light enough even for the much larger mass and
| power budgets of an Apollo spacecraft (vis a vis Lunar
| Orbiter or similar probe).
| vkou wrote:
| Robotics has advanced a lot further from the 60s than the
| ability of people wearing space suits to manipulate
| instruments.
|
| In fact, the latter hasn't really advanced at all in
| those 60 years.
| retzkek wrote:
| Coincidentally last night I re-watched one of my favorite
| episodes of "From the Earth to the Moon," "Galileo was
| Right," which focuses on the Apollo 15 crews getting
| field training in geology. Their instructor (along with
| backup LM pilot Jack Schmitt, a geologist, who then flew
| on Apollo 17) emphasized identifying and collecting the
| "right" rocks, not just "any" rocks, which led to some of
| the more interesting samples, including the "Genesis
| Rock."
| vkou wrote:
| The reason the space program wound down was because the moon
| race was a vanity project. Once the vanity goal was achieved,
| nobody had any reason to go back there.
|
| Meanwhile, people and groups with non-vanity goals are making
| extensive use of space in 2021, compared to 1969... But that's
| not very sexy, because things like weather satellites and
| imaging satellites, and communications satellites and the
| occasional telescope actually accomplish concrete, useful
| things, at a fraction of the Apollo budget.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| > nobody had any reason to go back there
|
| Don't tell that to the Radio Astronomers. Something,
| something, dark side.[0]
|
| [0]https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phas
| e_...
| MyHypatia wrote:
| There's a fantastic song about Collin's role in Apollo 11 that
| perfectly captures his role in the mission: "sitting backstage
| vs. taking the fame".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86q_xc3kZ9g&ab_channel=JohnC...
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| RIP Michael Collins. Jethro Tull has a song about Michael
| Collins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU7BYLmAiV8 "For Michael
| Collins, Jeffery and Me" I'm with you L.E.M
| Though it's a shame that it had to be you The mother ship
| Is just a blip from your trip made for two I'm with you
| boys So please employ just a little extra care
| It's on my mind I'm left behind when I should have been
| there Walking with you
| leet_thow wrote:
| First thought too after reading the title
| colordrops wrote:
| Michael Collins was one of many astronauts that claimed to have
| seen UFOs or at least firmly believe in extraterrestrial life.
| nr2x wrote:
| The ultimate designated driver.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I met Collins many years later. I was a terminally shy child at
| the time so I don't remember much, but he graciously autographed
| his entry in ... some Encyclopedia of Space somethingsomething
| book I had. I should probably try to dig up that book and eBay
| it.
|
| Anyways, RIP.
| jsrcout wrote:
| Sad news. He was articulate and passionate, but very humble also.
| His book Carrying the Fire revived my interest in space as a
| 30-something adult who grew up dreaming of being an astronaut.
| benatkin wrote:
| Only this one left https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGFcC5IZyvs
| aphextron wrote:
| I'm convinced he will live forever. My mental health depends on
| it.
| kube-system wrote:
| This will always be my favorite Buzz video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y-Pc0cz-9o
| anonymousiam wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW3yQ4ye9ac
| areoform wrote:
| I cried today. I don't cry when strangers die, famous strangers
| particularly. But I cried today when I heard he had passed. He
| was a profound man who deserves a profound eulogy. That's beyond
| my capabilities, but I'd like to give it a good shake anyway.
|
| I never had the good fortune of crossing paths with him except
| for the one time he liked one of my tweets (I joked that I'd been
| touched by celebrity - he _intensely_ disliked celebrities). But
| I want to take a moment to describe how much Michael Collins
| meant to me.
|
| His book, Carrying The Fire, https://www.amazon.com/Carrying-
| Fire-Astronauts-Michael-Coll... is one of the reasons why I've
| decided to go into aerospace and take my shot at becoming an
| astronaut as an adult. He wrote parts of this book in orbit
| around the moon, and the rest when he came back to Earth. It is
| hard to describe the degree of tender self awareness that he
| possessed and the insight with which he wrote.
|
| His book is one of the few books where the forwards are just as
| important as the book itself. Here's one he recently wrote,
|
| > Could I be one of twelve of eighteen thousand? No way in hell.
|
| It is rare for someone to acknowledge the locus at which the sum
| of their perspiration and preparation collided with the vagaries
| of fate. It is rarer still for them to say that had they been
| born later, or had the circumstances been any different, they
| might not have been the same. And it is far rarer for someone to
| talk about the mistakes of youth with this level of humor and
| care,
|
| > Never mind the excuses, I was a mediocre student, more
| interested in athletics than academics. I was captain of the
| wrestling team, but even that was a bit tainted, as I was also a
| secret smoker. Stupid.
|
| He had, as he admits in the forward, ADHD that went undiagnosed
| at the time. His teachers thought he was lazy, and he struggled
| in school. His grades were subpar, and at some point he woke up
| and he was thirty, writing,
|
| > How had I managed to take so long to get so little done -- no
| advanced degree, a piddling two thousand hours' flying time,
| thirty years old, and nothing special in my record to offset
| these deficiencies?
|
| A lot of books by people who have experienced what it is like to
| have history's eye upon them don't go into such details. And if
| they do, they tend to be written by others or they suffer from
| terminal self-aggrandizement. Collins' account doesn't suffer
| from this. It feels so raw and real, an inner exploration just as
| much an outer one.
|
| It's as if we sent on Apollo 11 not just a preternaturally calm
| man with oodles of the Right Stuff (Neil Armstrong) and an
| orbital mechanics expert (Buzz Aldrin), but also a self-aware
| artist who recorded some of the most beautiful images of the trip
| and tried to capture the beauty of what he saw in front of him in
| verse. A man who can recite passages from Paradise Lost from
| heart and talks about the importance of bringing art and joy into
| the sciences.
| https://twitter.com/AstroMCollins/status/1313882376225734656
|
| NASA chose well.
|
| Here's one final quote from Carrying The Fire,
|
| > 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.
|
| I lied. Here's another Michael Collins-ism,
|
| > Farmers speak to farmers, students to students, business
| leaders to other business leaders, but this intramural talk
| serves mainly to mirror one's beliefs, to reinforce existing
| prejudices, to lock out opposing views
|
| -
|
| I'm holding a quasi-vigil for him on the aerospace club Small
| Steps & Giant Leaps in ClubHouse by reading Carrying the Fire
| personally or via the audiobook. You are welcome to join us and
| read a passage, a chapter, or whatever suits your fancy.
|
| Here's the link, just come in the room and raise your hand, we'll
| pull you up :)
|
| https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/PrDlo22D
|
| -
|
| Here's an excellent interview of him from 2019 talking about
| SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, and Mars
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtIO06N3sw
| MDVein wrote:
| Very sad to hear, an inspiration to those who enjoy Space and
| the outer reaches of our atmosphere.
| parenthesis wrote:
| Appropriately he has died just after a full moon.
| grouphugs wrote:
| no one cares what nazis think about another nazi
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Only four people are still alive that have walked on the moon and
| only 10 Apollo Moon mission people are still alive.
|
| https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/890/who-has-walked-on-the-...
| hinkley wrote:
| We are now in a race to see if the last people on the moon are
| still around to congratulate the next people to stand on the
| moon.
| DarkByte wrote:
| The greatest ambassador to the space effort. Always humble and
| selfless.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| It turns out that https://xkcd.com/893/ was posted almost ten
| years ago. Although he didn't actually get to walk on the moon,
| he still went there.
| FabHK wrote:
| Very accurate so far.
| benatkin wrote:
| He didn't score the most points, but he got the most rebounds
| and assists.
| macintux wrote:
| The alt text is quite poignant.
|
| > The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves
| of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that
| there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered,
| studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational
| decision.
| martincmartin wrote:
| This was the first thing I thought of. Thanks for posting.
| quercusa wrote:
| Statement from his family:
| https://twitter.com/AstroMCollins/status/1387438495040348168
| utopcell wrote:
| https://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/
| lambda_dn wrote:
| Irish people should be sad that someone who fought for their
| independence has died.
| FabHK wrote:
| 12 people have walked on the moon (4 are still alive), 12 more
| people have flown around the moon (6 are still alive). Time to go
| again.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Huge fan. "Carrying the Fire" was one of the greatest finds in my
| (rural Florida, 1970's) high school library. I'd never heard
| anyone say "I bore easily", let alone someone as responsible as
| an astronaut, I was awed by the vulnerability, and encouraged
| that boring easily wasn't necessarily debilitating. A great book,
| a great man.
| japhyr wrote:
| For anyone interested in the story of the astronauts who went to
| the moon, Moondust is a great read. In the early 2000s (if I
| remember right), the author traveled around the world to visit
| each of the living men who had set foot on the moon. He asks them
| about their experiences, both on the moon and in the time since
| the moon missions ended. Some of them treat him like any
| interviewer, but toward the end as they realize he has actually
| connected all of their stories once again, they share a bit more
| than what comes out in typical interviews.
|
| It's a wonderful blending of life in the world at that time, the
| story of our collective quest to reach the moon, and the
| individual stories of humans who actually went there.
|
| - https://www.amazon.com/Moondust-Search-Men-Fell-Earth/dp/152...
| jbrnh wrote:
| A similar concept, it seems, Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the
| Moon" is a fantastic read.
| slg wrote:
| Collins' role in Apollo 11 is often minimized in the public
| conciseness, but I find it particularly fascinating from a human
| perspective. In certain ways it seems even scarier than
| Armstrong's and Aldrin's jobs. They at least had more direct
| control over their success in landing on the moon. Collins was
| largely powerless to help if something went wrong. If that did
| happen, he would have been faced with the choice of abandoning
| his crewmates to die on the moon and fly back to Earth himself.
| Meanwhile no one had ever been as far from other life as he was
| on that flight. When he was on the far side of the moon he was
| truly alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human
| history.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| I read an article some time ago about the opposite scenario. I
| searched for the article just now but didn't find it; would be
| curious if anyone has a link.
|
| I remembered it something like this (but see soarfourmore's
| reply for a correction): what if the command module pilot
| became incapacitated but was still alive?
|
| The lunar module could still dock with the command module, but
| the astronauts would not be able to get into the command module
| because the the CM pilot could not open the hatch on that side.
|
| So their only option would be to do a spacewalk over to the
| command module and open an _external_ hatch to get in.
|
| The would not know at that point whether the CM pilot had his
| spacesuit helmet on or not, so they wouldn't know until they
| opened the hatch whether they had just killed him.
| [deleted]
| soarfourmore wrote:
| > The would not know at that point whether the CM pilot had
| his spacesuit helmet on or not, so they wouldn't know until
| they opened the hatch whether they had just killed him.
|
| There were windows on the command module to look in, and if
| they weren't sure if he was responsive/unresponsive, they
| could tap iron onto the command module to let Collins know
| they were there and spacewalking.
|
| It's an interesting thought process though, and I would
| appreciate the source if you can find it
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Found it!
|
| https://spaceflightblunders.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/lunar-
| o...
|
| From the article, I was wrong about not knowing whether the
| CMP was alive:
|
| "Unless there was a very serious issue with the CM's
| communications systems, NASA would know of the CMP's fate
| immediately. Every astronaut wears biomedical sensors at
| all times, as part of their constant-wear garment. This
| telemetry is sent to the flight surgeon."
|
| More discussion here:
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/45426/procedure-
| to...
|
| A comment from that page:
|
| "Probably the worst scenario would be for the CMP to be
| alive, but disabled and not in his spacesuit. There would
| be no way for the other astronauts to get to the CMP
| without depressurizing the CM, thus killing the CMP. It's
| an obvious choice between three astronauts stranded in
| lunar orbit, versus two getting home alive. Nonetheless, I
| can only imagine the regret that the astronaut who would
| have to depressurize the CM would have."
|
| So it is even worse than the way I remembered it: the LM
| pilots would likely _know_ that the CMP pilot was alive but
| incapacitated and they were about to kill him.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't know how fast they'd be able to enter and
| repressurize the capsule, but I suppose there's a chance he
| could survive in that scenario. Though depending on why was
| incapacitated in the first place his chances may have even
| more diminished by whatever afflicted him.
| Animats wrote:
| _What if the command module pilot became incapacitated but
| was still alive?_
|
| That's why one of the mission planning decisions was that the
| astronaut tasked with operating the orbiter must have
| previous time in space.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Apollo 15, 16 and 17 did perform nominal EVAs from the
| command module after the lunar landing, to retrieve film
| cassettes. To this day they are the only 3 deep space EVAs
| ever made. All others have been either in Earth orbit or on
| the moon.
| hcrisp wrote:
| To clarify, they were _transearth_ EVAs, so they were not
| even during orbit around the moon. I recall seeing some
| upscaled videos on youtube of this which looked pretty
| unearthly.
|
| https://www.history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-30_Extravehi
| c...
| tintor wrote:
| All of humanity in one picture except for Michael Collins:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/63ztoy/all_of_hu...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The OG anti-selfie.
| pacetherace wrote:
| Sorry to correct you. But the first person alone in lunar orbit
| was John Young during the Apollo 10 mission
| 16bytes wrote:
| While that's true, during Apollo 10 didn't the LEM and CM
| stay on the same side of the Moon?
|
| The "loneliest" anecdote is based on how far away Michael
| Collins was from the next closest people. Since the LEM was
| on the other side of the moon once per orbit, Collins was
| much further away from other people than John Young got.
| pbourke wrote:
| Young also commanded STS-1, the first shuttle launch mission.
| slg wrote:
| I'm unclear on what you are correcting. I didn't state he was
| the first to do a lunar orbit in his own spacecraft, but he
| was the first to do it without any other nearby craft. As far
| as I'm aware, the lunar module and the command module were
| never actually that far apart during Apollo 10. So while they
| were separated, the distance between the two was measured in
| hundreds of miles rather than the thousands of miles that was
| true during Apollo 11 and the later lunar landings.
| bishnu wrote:
| I mean, a few guys stayed in orbit on subsequent lunar
| missions, but you're right, Collins was the first.
| slg wrote:
| >he was truly alone in a way that no other person had ever
| been in human history
|
| The "had" there was meant to imply it was true up until that
| point in history. Other people have either nearly matched or
| slightly exceeded him depending on the specific details of
| the later Apollo mission lunar orbits. However it is mentally
| easier to be the second person to do something dangerous once
| you see the first person succeed safely. There is a reason
| everyone knows Armstrong and Aldrin, but Conrad and Bean
| don't have much notoriety today in the general population.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| For the sake of clarifying further:
|
| At least according to usage that I'm familiar with, if the
| phrase were, "no other person _has_ ever been ", that would
| be talking about before or since. But "no other person
| _had_ ever been " is only talking about history up until
| that point. "Has been" is the present perfect tense, and
| "had been" is the past perfect tense.
| Kye wrote:
| I just finished For All Mankind and this was one of the choices
| explored in the first season.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Collins also spent a lot of time outside of radio comms.
|
| If something had gone wrong on the dark side of the moon, we
| might never have known what happened. We'd have had a perfectly
| cheerful conversation with the command module pilot, then a
| comms blackout, then nothing... With a lot of coordination, the
| lander crew could _possibly_ have returned to the command
| module without Collins 's support to find out what happened to
| him (and hopefully found a CM still in a condition to go home).
|
| And for all that, he reported in his autobiography that it
| didn't bother him.
| 7952 wrote:
| It seems to me that astronauts are selected precisely because
| they are not bothered by that kind of existential worry and
| fear. If something is wrong they work the problem and perhaps
| die trying.
| hbrav wrote:
| For the benefit of anyone who hasn't read it, his
| autobiography is called Carrying The Fire, and is excellent.
| dmurray wrote:
| > Meanwhile no one had ever been as far from other life as he
| was on that flight.
|
| Xkcd has a good fact check on this: it's just about plausible
| that some Polynesian or Antarctic explorer, the last survivor
| of a doomed expedition, was the furthest from any other human.
| But more likely it is the CSM commanders.
|
| I note you say "other life" rather than "other humans", which
| would make it more clear cut in favour of Collins if we don't
| count whatever microorganisms travelled in Collins' gut and on
| every surface of Apollo.
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/72/
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Xkcd has a good fact check on this: it 's just about
| plausible that some Polynesian or Antarctic explorer, the
| last survivor of a doomed expedition, was the furthest from
| any other human. But more likely it is the CSM commanders._
|
| See Point Nemo:
|
| > _The oceanic pole of inaccessibility (48deg52.5'S
| 123deg23.6'W)[17] is the place in the ocean that is farthest
| from land. It lies in the South Pacific Ocean, 2,688 km
| (1,670 mi) from the nearest lands: Ducie Island (part of the
| Pitcairn Islands) to the north, Motu Nui (part of the Easter
| Islands) to the northeast, and Maher Island (near the larger
| Siple Island, off the coast of Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica)
| to the south. The area is so remote that--as with any
| location more than 400 kilometres (about 250 miles) from an
| inhabited area--sometimes the closest human beings are
| astronauts aboard the International Space Station when it
| passes overhead.[18][19]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Ocean
| i...
|
| There are sailing races (group and solo (and non-stop)) that
| venture into those waters:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Race
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vend%C3%A9e_Globe
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Golden_Globe_Race
| soarfourmore wrote:
| It's plausible. The moon's width is 2,158.8 miles, and I
| could imagine an explorer being >3000 miles from another
| human
| Igelau wrote:
| The actual travel distance would be further because you
| can't just bore through the moon.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| I'm too lazy to do the math, but what's the point-to-point
| distance (through the planet) of points that are 5000km
| along the surface?
| slg wrote:
| I did think about that possibility which is why I wrote
| "life" and not "humans". Perhaps it should have been "visible
| life" or "non-microscopic life". Being alone on the ocean is
| certainly scary, but there is enough life and resources in
| the water to sustain someone basically indefinitely. Collins
| was alone beyond the tiny organisms that the crew brought up
| with them.
| Zickzack wrote:
| > Collins was largely powerless to help if something went
| wrong. If that did happen, he would have been faced with the
| choice of abandoning his crewmates to die on the moon and fly
| back to Earth himself.
|
| He would have died in orbit then, just a little bit closer to
| the rest of mankind. There was no was way for him to return to
| solid Earth unless the lunar module came back. He was dependent
| on the outcome of the Lunar mission and he was not even allwed
| to set his foot onto Moon. One of my heros since childhood...
| pdonis wrote:
| _> There was no was way for him to return to solid Earth
| unless the lunar module came back._
|
| I'm not sure what you're basing that on. The Apollo 11 flight
| plan, available on the NASA website [1], shows LM jettison
| before TEI burn. That indicates that the LM was not needed
| for TEI. If for some reason the LM did not come back from the
| surface of the Moon, the CSM could still execute the TEI
| burn.
|
| [1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11fltpln_final_reformat
| .pd...
| mulmen wrote:
| The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is
| conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before
| TEI. Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations
| or some other maneuvers. That it was jettisoned before the
| burn tells us nothing about the necessity of the module up
| to the moment it was jettisoned.
| Latty wrote:
| A necessary fuel transfer, at least, wouldn't make sense.
| If fuel was _needed_ to come back, sending it down and
| back again would have just meant wasting more fuel for no
| benefit to lug it there and back again.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is
| conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step
| before TEI._
|
| The flight plan makes clear that this is not the case.
|
| _> Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations
| or some other maneuvers._
|
| Even without reading the details of the flight plan, the
| LM was designed to carry just enough fuel to get down to
| the Moon's surface and back up again, with no extra fuel
| for other maneuvers; there wasn't any margin for any
| extra if the mission was to be doable at all. So it
| doesn't seem plausible that the CSM would have had to
| depend on getting some fuel transferred back from the LM
| in order to execute TEI.
|
| As far as guidance calculations, that doesn't seem
| plausible either. The CSM, having been in a single stable
| orbit the whole time, would be expected to have much
| better guidance information than the LM, which had just
| executed a series of maneuvers, some of which were under
| manual control.
| mulmen wrote:
| Sure, that all makes sense, and we know how it worked and
| that the LM was not needed. I'm just saying that we can't
| infer the LM was unneeded for TEI just because it was
| jettisoned.
| pwg wrote:
| Hmm, wouldn't the simplest explanation for the LM
| returning to the CSM before the TEI burn be for the
| simple reason of returning the two crew-members who went
| to the lunar surface to the CSM before initiation of the
| TEI burn?
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah, of course, but that doesn't mean that was the only
| reason, and since that had to happen maybe TEI relied on
| the return of the astronauts and/or LM from the Lunar
| surface.
|
| My point was just that if our only information is that
| the LM returned to the CSM and was jettisoned before TEI
| we can't deduce that the LM was not needed for TEI.
| jhgb wrote:
| > There was no was way for him to return to solid Earth
| unless the lunar module came back.
|
| Where did you get that idea from? This is the first time I
| see someone claiming something like that.
| iqr11 wrote:
| Probably from the film _Apollo 13_ , which depicts (likely
| wise) hesitance to fire the SPS due to suspected damage and
| instead firing midcourse correction burns with the LEM
| descent stage while attached to the CSM. By contrast,
| during the otherwise normal Apollo 11, SPS was responsible
| for returning Collins and the CSM to Earth (TEI) whether he
| retrieved Armstrong and Aldrin or not. The latter case was
| a rehearsed abort and the stakes were known, but the
| maneuver was otherwise the same as a normal TEI (excluding
| LEM jettison, obviously). Nixon's backup speech illustrates
| this, as it eulogizes those two alone; Collins would have
| most likely returned on his own in that horrible
| circumstance barring a further failure of some kind.
| [deleted]
| kyberias wrote:
| That is not true. They jettisoned the Eagle's ascent stage
| and returned with Columbia.
| hbrav wrote:
| Err, this isn't correct. There would be be nothing preventing
| the command module from returning home in the event of the
| lunar lander not coming back from the moon. Though of course
| the command module pilot would be a bit more task-loaded.
|
| I think you're thinking of the other way around - the LEM
| would have been unable to return to earth with the command
| and service modules. It lacked a heatshield.
| mulmen wrote:
| Wait really? I never knew that. I thought the CSM had
| guidance and the main engine, why did he need the LEM to get
| home?
| trothamel wrote:
| That's correct. He could have gotten home without the LM.
| (See Apollo 8, which didn't have an LM at all.)
| toyg wrote:
| _> it seems even scarier than Armstrong 's and Aldrin's jobs.
| [...] When he was on the far side of the moon he was truly
| alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human
| history._
|
| This was used by Naoki Urasawa in his "20th Century Boys" manga
| series. The main villain, who has effectively isolated himself
| from his humanity, keeps repeating "I am Michael Collins", to
| describe his delusion of being at once the loneliest being ever
| _and_ the one from which everyone else will eventually depend.
| pornel wrote:
| I love the photo he took, where in the frame there was literally
| every human who was alive and has ever lived, except Michael
| Collins himself:
|
| https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/a11_h_44...
| hcrisp wrote:
| He spoke about this in the documentary film, _In the Shadow of
| the Moon_ [0], "Certainly I didn't feel it as fear, I felt it
| as awareness, almost a feeling of exultation. I liked it! It
| was a good feeling." He mentioned the same thing in his book,
| _Carrying the Fire_ (I saw that NPR is calling it "the best of
| the astronaut autobiographies", and having read it, I concur.)
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMx2MA5bEtk
| sp3000 wrote:
| "How isolated, how lonely those two space supermen appeared!
| But they had each other for companionship; and through
| television, they were held in the thoughts of viewing millions
| of men and women. To be really isolated, to fully experience
| loneliness, you must be alone. From Armstrong's and Aldrin's
| spectacular movements, my mind shifted to Collins's lunar
| orbiting. Relatively inactive and unwatched, he had time for
| contemplation, time to study both the nearby surface of the
| moon and the distant moonlike world. Here was human awareness
| floating through universal reaches, attached to our earth by
| such tenuous bonds as radio waves and star sights. A minor
| functional error would leave it floating forever in the space
| from which, ancestrally, it came."
|
| Charles Lindbergh's forward in Carrying the Fire.
| yarg wrote:
| I feel bad for Collins, at best he got the "also participated"
| award in the public mindshare - and this despite that fact he was
| left more alone than any man in history, locked about the dark
| side of the moon, wondering if he was going home alone.
| dokem wrote:
| It's hard to imagine that bitter-sweetness he must've felt. At
| the same time, how could he ever complain. Maybe he took no
| issue, but I'm sure everyone in the program was hoping to be
| the first man.
| mbauman wrote:
| I've always thought the CSM commanders had the most incredible
| and challenging role of the three Apollo astronauts. They were
| undoubtedly the "most alone" humans ever -- at least on a
| physical level. Every other hour they'd transit to the far side
| of the moon and would be 2200 miles (3600km) away from the
| nearest two humans and hundreds of thousands of miles/km away
| from everyone else who's ever lived. Not only that, they lost
| radio contact. The silence and solitude must have been wild.
|
| For upwards of three days.
|
| From the NYT obit:
|
| "I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any
| known life," [Collins] wrote in recreating his thoughts for his
| 1974 memoir, "Carrying the Fire."
|
| "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," he added. "I like the feeling. Outside my
| window I can see stars -- and that is all. Where I know the moon
| to be, there is simply a black void."
| jl6 wrote:
| What I find remarkable about that quote is that there were only
| three billion humans at the time. Apollo 11 wasn't _that_ long
| ago was it? And we're already at a population more than twice
| that figure.
| computerphage wrote:
| Before covid, worldometers was known for tracking population
| data!
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#table-
| histor...
| Diablesse wrote:
| Jj
| ppierald wrote:
| In 1970 (shortly after my birth), my grandmother bought me my
| first Christmas ornament for the tree. It was a glass Michael
| Collins astronaut figure. Over the years, it has taken a couple
| tumbles, lost a leg and most of the helmet, but every year it
| goes up to the top of the tree in a prominent place. I was struck
| with a profound sense of sadness today when I heard of his
| passing mostly due to my connection to him via this simple
| ornament. He will continue on in that place of prominence and I
| hope to pass this on to my children and their children at some
| point.
| caution wrote:
| Statements on Passing of Michael Collins.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/statements-on-passing-of-...
| raverbashing wrote:
| "As pilot of the Apollo 11 command module - some called him
| 'the loneliest man in history' - while his colleagues walked on
| the Moon for the first time, he helped our nation achieve a
| defining milestone."
|
| In a way it was a bit disappointing. But it was also a big,
| huge responsibility. Remember, if something went wrong with the
| Eagle, he was going to return alone to Earth.
| Diablesse wrote:
| Ok
| WalterBright wrote:
| Michael Collins is the ultimate team player. What a privilege it
| would have been to work with him. It's sad to read of his
| passing, but I'm glad he got 90 years. A great man.
| Anointmous wrote:
| rip.
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