by Dan Parry
Following the family tradition, Collins attended West Point Military Academy, principally for a free education rather than to pursue an interest in the army. He could have made much of the fact that his father was a general and his uncle, a corps commander on D-Day, was now the army's chief of staff. But Michael played down his connections, to the point that after graduating in 1952 he declined to join the army at all, choosing the air force instead. After training at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, in 1954 Collins was sent to an F-86 fighter squadron that was soon transferred to Chambley-Bussières, a NATO base in north-eastern France.
At Chambley in early 1956 Michael met 21-year-old Patricia Finnegan. Pretty, with a vivid smile, Pat was a graduate in English who was working for the air force as a civilian. To her, Michael looked 'just as dashing, just as white-scarfy, as the others', but she was impressed by his knowledge of fine wines and French cuisine, along with his love of books and interest in the theatre. She thought he was simply 'lots and lots of fun', and above all she admired his approach to life: 'It was, and is, that everything will be OK; that everything will work out.' They married on 28 April 1957, and returned to the States a few months later.
Initially Michael had intended to complete his required four years in military service before finding something he was more suited to (his mother had suggested the State Department), but in France he found that flying had become a passion. Rather than leaving, he looked at how he might channel a restless desire for fulfilment. Collins felt the best way to get on was to become a test pilot, and he sought to accumulate the hours required by the air force's test pilot school at Edwards. Flying a variety of aircraft, Michael moved from post to post until August 1960, when the school eventually accepted him.7 As a trainee test pilot, Collins learnt to 'observe, remember, and record every last movement of a bucking, heaving, spinning plane', doing so with such proficiency that on graduation he was the only member of his class assigned to test fighter jets.
During 1961 the number of available test-flights began to dwindle and Collins found himself casting his eye further afield. Rumours that NASA was about to hire a second group of astronauts were confirmed in April 1962, and Collins, in contrast to Armstrong's dawdling, applied 'before the ink was dry on the announcement'.8 Manned space-flight was still in its infancy, and with scant information on the long-term effects of orbital missions NASA felt obliged to inspect the health of its applicants in great detail. Candidates were strapped to a table and their cardio-vascular response measured after they were jerked upright. In other tests, cold water was poured into one ear, 'eyeball pressure' was assessed, and one foot of bowel was examined using a rectal 'steel eel'. After being poked, prodded and pierced, Collins felt that 'no orifice was inviolate', the medics only giving way in order to allow the psychiatrists to take over. When asked to describe a sheet of white paper, Collins wondered what he should say. 'Perhaps I see a great white moon in it, or a picture of Mother and Dad, with Dad a little larger than Mother. Second-guessing the shrinks is not easy.'9 He scored highly in the two-month selection process, but his lack of postgraduate study and his limited test-flight experience were deemed insufficient compared to the likes of Armstrong, and ultimately he was rejected.
Just nine men were successful, including Armstrong, despite his late application. This was thanks to the support of Dick Day, a friend who had already made the move from Edwards to Houston. An expert in flight simulators, Day had been appointed as assistant director of the Flight Crew Operations Division and in this capacity he acted as secretary to the selection panel. He admitted that he and a number of others valued Armstrong's experience and wanted him to apply, so when Neil finally got round to it Day quietly slipped the late application into the pile along with the rest.10
In October 1962, while the New Nine settled into the space programme, Collins went back to Edwards, where he set about building the experience he needed. Fortunately the air force had begun to teach the science of orbital flight to hand-picked graduates of its test pilot courses, and Michael was able to spend six months acquiring the knowledge he lacked. In June 1963 NASA again asked for astronaut applications, and after another session with the 'steel eel', Collins was successful.11 Accompanied by Pat and their three children Kate, Ann and Michael junior, in October 1963 Collins headed south to Texas.
By the time the fourteen new recruits arrived in Houston, NASA was preparing to take the next step towards one day reaching the Moon. In the end there had been six Mercury flights, the longest lasting a little over 34 hours. This mission had provided valuable data, but a trip to the Moon might last anything up to two weeks and many questions had yet to be answered. Just how dangerous were the belts of radiation surrounding the Earth, which threatened to harm anyone venturing near them for too long? How long was too long? At least their location could be identified; solar flares, on the other hand, which also posed a radiation risk, were in 1963 largely unpredictable. After arriving on the Moon, would the crew and their 'lunar lander' spacecraft vanish into a thick blanket of dust, as suggested by Professor Thomas Gold of Cornell University? Other eminent scientists feared that if the lander did successfully settle on the surface, a charge of static electricity would attract so much dust that nobody would be able to see out of the windows. No-one was going to fly all the way there and back without actually stepping out of the spacecraft, but how could an astronaut be protected from the vacuum of space or the extreme temperatures of light and shade? The Moon was pockmarked by countless meteoroid craters, but just how often did meteoroids hit the surface? Continuously? Did lunar soil contain pure metallic elements that would spontaneously combust when carried by dirty boots into the pure oxygen that filled the lander's cabin?12 What should the lander even look like?
The years 1963 and 1964 were dominated by the search for answers to questions such as these, early results being drip-fed into training sessions. Since everything was geared towards a lunar landing, the training included a series of geology lectures. The Mercury veterans grumbled about learning to describe grey, lumpy stones as 'hypidiomorphic granular, porphyritic, with medium-grained grey phenochrists', but to the new recruits the lectures brought the Moon a little closer. Nevertheless, Collins sometimes found the lessons a little dull, particularly when he found himself trudging along on the back of a mule after one of the field trips. 'From supersonic jets at Edwards,' he later wrote, 'I had progressed all the way to kicking a burro up out of the Grand Canyon.'13 Between lessons, the Mercury Seven, the New Nine and the Fourteen, as the press referred to them, toured launch facilities at the Cape and inspected the new Mission Control Center in Houston. They also underwent survival training, learning to live off the land in deserts and jungles in case they came down somewhere beyond immediate reach of help. During environment training they were exposed to the noise, vibration and weightlessness of space-flight, enduring trips in what was then referred to as the 'zero-g airplane', better known today as the 'vomit comet'. As well as attending the training sessions, each astronaut also had to take on a particular area of research, representing the Astronaut Office in design meetings and test sessions. Armstrong worked on flight simulators;14 Collins was asked to help develop pressure-suits and other equipment that would be used during space walks (properly referred to as extra-vehicular activity, or EVA).
Many of the difficulties accompanying a flight to the Moon were to be explored during a series of orbital research flights, and accomplishing a successful EVA was close to the top of the list. The Mercury capsule was too small for most of this work (it was said you didn't board it so much as put it on), and by 1965 its replacement was ready to fly. Capable of accommodating two people for days at a time, the bigger Gemini spacecraft replaced Mercury's small hatch with wide hinged doors. It was intended that during the first Gemini EVA an astronaut would open the doors, stand up and simply look around. But, as before, Russian advances forced NASA to quicken its pace. On 18 March 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to leave his sp
acecraft during a flight. Pictures released to the international press showed him waving to the camera as he floated comfortably above the Earth. But with the Soviet secrecy that was typical of the time, the Russians did not reveal the difficulty Leonov experienced in returning to his spacecraft, Voskhod 2. While floating in space, his pressure-suit ballooned and despite an anxious struggle during which he suffered the first symptoms of heatstroke, he was unable to climb back through the airlock. After losing 12lb in body weight, Leonov was forced to partially deflate his suit – a dangerous move under any conditions. The Russians found through hard experience that returning to a spacecraft after an EVA was far from easy. Collins independently came to the same conclusion while taking part in tests aboard the zero-g aircraft. In a memo, he warned that an 'extravehicular astro requires all his strength and agility to get back inside the spacecraft'.15 It was a lesson NASA was slow to learn.
Astronaut Ed White, Collins's close friend from West Point, strenuously objected to the warnings, going on to make the whole process look easy while performing America's first EVA three months after Leonov.16 With nothing to do but enjoy himself, White found he could easily move through space using blasts of oxygen from his 'zip gun'. For more than 20 minutes he freely floated above the Earth until ordered back into his spacecraft by Mission Control. The public fell in love with Ed's boyish enthusiasm, and his triumphant accomplishment encouraged NASA to race ahead with ambitious plans for future EVAs.
Next to leave his spacecraft was Gene Cernan. Secured to the outside of the rear of Cernan's capsule was a backpack equipped with small thrusters, which he was intending to fly as if he himself were a mini spacecraft. On 5 June 1966, Cernan huffed and puffed his way back towards the backpack, known as the 'astronaut manoeuvring unit'. Lacking sufficient handrails and footholds, and breathing heavily, he suffered sunburn on his lower back after tearing the outer layers of his pressure-suit while trying to drag himself along the spacecraft's hull. Once in position, he found it so difficult to complete his task that he was forced to take frequent rests. With his visor fogging and his body beginning to overheat it was clear he was in serious trouble. As his pulse soared to around 195 beats per minute, the flight surgeon in Mission Control feared Cernan would lose consciousness. The experiment was abandoned, and after Cernan returned to the hatch Tom Stafford struggled to pull him back into his seat. Once they had repressurised the capsule Stafford felt compelled to break procedure by firing a jet of water into Cernan's face to help him recover. Had Cernan not made it back aboard the capsule, rather than cut his tether and leave him in orbit it is likely that Stafford would have strapped him to the side of the spacecraft where his body would have been cremated on re-entry.
Despite Ed White's success, NASA knew 'diddly-squat' about EVA, Cernan later wrote. His experience showed that the agency had not yet developed the training, procedures or equipment required to complete a successful EVA. There was much to learn before anyone could contemplate walking on the Moon. At least on the lunar surface it would be easier to move about. But those responsible for the development of the spacesuit, including Collins, would have to come up with a more robust design incorporating an improved cooling system.
In the meantime there were just three Gemini flights left, all would involve EVAs, and next to go was Michael.
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With just three hours remaining before the launch of Apollo 11, Collins moved through the corridors of the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, smiling at old friends and colleagues from inside his pressure helmet. By prior arrangement, one of them handed him a brown paper bag containing a gift for Guenter Wendt, the technician in charge of the launch-pad. Collins and Wendt frequently fished together, and Michael enjoyed poking fun at Guenter's claims to have caught a spectacularly large trout. In celebration of Wendt's stories, Collins decided to present him with a tiny trout that had been frozen and secured to a wooden plaque above the words 'Guenter Wendt Trophy Trout'.
Clutching his bag, Michael stepped out into the early-morning sunlight, and with the press looking on he, Neil and Buzz clambered aboard the van that would take them on the eight-mile journey to the pad. On the way, the crew crossed the Banana River where, five miles downstream, Janet Armstrong was waiting aboard a boat.17 The only one of the three wives to attend the launch (Pat Collins and Joan Aldrin had chosen to stay at home to avoid the press), along with her children Janet was accompanied by astronaut Dave Scott and Life magazine reporter Dora Jane Hamblin. Meanwhile, ashore, more than 5,000 people were taking their places in an enclosure three and a half miles from the launch-pad – deemed to be the closest point where spectators would probably escape serious injury from an exploding Saturn V. The clouds had cleared, and although it was still early the humidity was climbing and the temperature was already in the high eighties.
In the VIP stands, former president Lyndon Johnson was joined by senior NASA managers, led by Tom Paine. Beyond the Cape, millions of Americans were watching the live television coverage, among them President Nixon in Washington and hundreds of soldiers, sailors and airmen in Vietnam. Many astronauts had friends stationed in Asia, where already nearly 34,000 Americans had been killed, and some felt guilty that rather than serving alongside them they were being treated as celebrities. Gene Cernan, along with Tom Stafford, had made headlines just two months earlier following their part in Apollo 10. Cernan felt that Vietnam was his war, yet he was safely in America where he was regarded as a hero. The commander of US troops in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, had however managed to overcome any similar worries about where he ought to be and was also watching the launch from the stands. He was joined by cabinet ministers, foreign dignitaries, businessmen and half the members of Congress, together with a scattering of stars including aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, comedian Jack Benny, and Johnny Carson, host of NBC's Tonight Show.
Nearby around 3,500 reporters from 55 countries were gathered in the press enclosure, their numbers swollen by the throng that had witnessed the astronauts depart aboard the van. It was a moment some felt to be shaped by the hand of history, and venerable reporters like Eric Sevareid found themselves ascending into lofty rhetoric. 'You get a feeling,' Sevareid told the equally venerable Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman, 'that people think of these men as not just superior men but different creatures. They are like people who have gone into the other world and have returned, and you sense they bear secrets that we will never entirely know.'18
Wearing nappies and carrying a dead fish, the astronauts meanwhile were lumbering across the deserted launch-pad, still breathing through a tube. Previously they had seen it only as a hive of activity. 'Did everyone know something we didn't know?' Michael Collins later asked in jest. The only thing that exuded life was the rocket itself. Absorbing electrical power, exhaling oxygen and loaded with a million gallons of propellants, the vehicle hissed and groaned as it adjusted to its fully laden weight.
A high-speed wire lift whisked the crew up the tower to the highest swing arm, at the end of which the tiny White Room adjoined the command module. There wasn't room for all three men to board the spacecraft at once, so while Aldrin waited on the tower, Armstrong led Collins across the access arm, accompanied by Guenter Wendt. A technician with thick glasses and a caricature accent, Wendt had served as a flight engineer aboard German night fighters during the war. Nicknamed the Pad Führer by the astronauts, the term was not always used in admiration of his good-humoured though committed style of leadership. In the sterile atmosphere of the White Room, a smiling Guenter gave Neil a farewell gift in the form of a 'key to the Moon', a four-foot-long Styrofoam key wrapped in foil. In return Neil presented him with a card that had been pushed under his watchstrap by suit technician Joe Schmitt. It read: 'Space Taxi. Good Between Any Two Planets'. Clasping a rail inside the spacecraft, Neil swung his legs through the hatch and pulled himself over to the commander's couch on the left-hand side of the cabin. Behind him, Collins presented the trophy trout to Guenter19 before he too swung
himself into the command module, sliding over to the couch on the right with the assistance of Fred Haise, a member of the backup crew who had spent 90 minutes preparing the cabin for launch, working his way down a 417-switch checklist.20 After Buzz had taken his position in the centre couch, Schmitt connected the astronauts to the spacecraft's oxygen supply and communications system and then climbed out of the hatch, followed by Haise, who shook each man's hand as he bid them farewell.
The suggestion that 'beneath the bravado, astronauts naturally felt fear' is something of a cliché. 'What was there to be afraid of?' Buzz later asked. 'When something goes wrong, that's when you should be afraid.' For the first time man was going to the Moon, where wonderful sights were waiting to be described, but rather than give the job to a coterie of wilting poets NASA had recruited test pilot types for a reason. Through a combination of personality and training, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, once strapped into a cockpit, were just not the kind of people predisposed to fear. 'What would be the point?' was the way it seemed to them. Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham described how he had silently besought those around him to 'please launch and get us away from all that hand-wringing'.21 Nevertheless, there was no getting away from the fact that here was a machine designed to generate an enormous prolonged explosion. But just how controlled was it exactly? When looking for a title for his 1974 autobiography, Collins was asked to sum up space-flight in a single phrase. For him it was like 'carrying fire to the Moon and back', and in wondering how this might be done his editor received the suggestion 'carefully, that's how, with lots of planning and at considerable risk ... the carrier must constantly be on his toes lest it spill'.22
