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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 se

by slg 6y ago

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.

bishnu 6y ago
I mean, a few guys stayed in orbit on subsequent lunar missions, but you're right, Collins was the first.
- slg 6y ago
  >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 6y ago
    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.
shadowgovt 6y ago
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.
- hbrav 6y ago
  For the benefit of anyone who hasn't read it, his autobiography is called Carrying The Fire, and is excellent.
- 7952 6y ago
  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.
dmurray 6y ago
> 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/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/72/
- slg 6y ago
  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.
- soarfourmore 6y ago
  It's plausible. The moon's width is 2,158.8 miles, and I could imagine an explorer being >3000 miles from another human
  - cbm-vic-20 6y ago
    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?
    - banana_giraffe 6y ago
      Assuming a spherical earth, it's 4873 km.
      - foobar1962 6y ago
        Assuming a spherical earth in a vacuum... One of the few times that simplifying assumption matches reality.
Kye 6y ago
I just finished For All Mankind and this was one of the choices explored in the first season.
Stratoscope 6y ago
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.
- soarfourmore 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    Found it! https://spaceflightblunders.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/lunar-orbit-rendezvous-when-your-cmp-dies/ 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-deal-with-the-death-of-apollo-astronaut-during-a-lunar-mission 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.
pacetherace 6y ago
Sorry to correct you. But the first person alone in lunar orbit was John Young during the Apollo 10 mission
- pbourke 6y ago
  Young also commanded STS-1, the first shuttle launch mission.
- 16bytes 6y ago
  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.
- slg 6y ago
  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.
  - gshubert17 6y ago
    Some mission parameters are at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10#Mission_parameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10#Mission_parameters The lunar orbit of the LM (Lunar Module) and CSM (Command-Service Module) had a period of 2.15 hours. The interval during which the LM orbited separately from the CSM was 8 hours 10 minutes, or about 3.8 orbits. Thus, at times both craft would have been on the far side of the moon. While the LM was in its lower orbit I don't know how much shorter its orbital period would have been, or whether it "lapped" the CSM during the time between closest approach and redocking.
Zickzack 6y ago
> 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...
- mulmen 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    That's correct. He could have gotten home without the LM. (See Apollo 8, which didn't have an LM at all.)
- jhgb 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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.
toyg 6y ago
> 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.
- XorNot 6y ago
  This might be one of the best villain "ticks" I've ever heard of.
tintor 6y ago
All of humanity in one picture except for Michael Collins: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/63ztoy/all_of_humanity_in_one_picture_except_for_michael/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/63ztoy/all_of_hu...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  The OG anti-selfie.
canadianfella 6y ago
Conciseness?
Zecc 6y ago
> public conciseness That was possibly an autocorrecto for "public consciousness", but I like how well it still applies.
hutzlibu 6y ago
" 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." Well, in terms of distance maybe, but I would argue, a lone surviver on a shipwrack no one knows about, or in some dessert - would be more alone, than an astronaut, being watched and thought about by millions and in direct communication with peopke. (was communication with earth possible, when the moon was in between?)
DocTomoe 6y ago
He also, during his orbits around the moon, was the most isolated human being alive, with thousands of miles to the next humans (Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon)

by slg 6y ago

bishnu 6y ago

I mean, a few guys stayed in orbit on subsequent lunar missions, but you're right, Collins was the first.

slg 6y ago
>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 6y ago
  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.

shadowgovt 6y ago

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.

hbrav 6y ago
For the benefit of anyone who hasn't read it, his autobiography is called Carrying The Fire, and is excellent.
7952 6y ago
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.

dmurray 6y ago

> 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/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/72/

slg 6y ago
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.
soarfourmore 6y ago
It's plausible. The moon's width is 2,158.8 miles, and I could imagine an explorer being >3000 miles from another human
- cbm-vic-20 6y ago
  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?
  - banana_giraffe 6y ago
    Assuming a spherical earth, it's 4873 km.
    - foobar1962 6y ago
      Assuming a spherical earth in a vacuum... One of the few times that simplifying assumption matches reality.

Kye 6y ago

I just finished For All Mankind and this was one of the choices explored in the first season.

Stratoscope 6y ago

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.

soarfourmore 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  Found it! https://spaceflightblunders.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/lunar-orbit-rendezvous-when-your-cmp-dies/ 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-deal-with-the-death-of-apollo-astronaut-during-a-lunar-mission 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.

pacetherace 6y ago

Sorry to correct you. But the first person alone in lunar orbit was John Young during the Apollo 10 mission

pbourke 6y ago
Young also commanded STS-1, the first shuttle launch mission.
16bytes 6y ago
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.
slg 6y ago
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.
- gshubert17 6y ago
  Some mission parameters are at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10#Mission_parameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10#Mission_parameters The lunar orbit of the LM (Lunar Module) and CSM (Command-Service Module) had a period of 2.15 hours. The interval during which the LM orbited separately from the CSM was 8 hours 10 minutes, or about 3.8 orbits. Thus, at times both craft would have been on the far side of the moon. While the LM was in its lower orbit I don't know how much shorter its orbital period would have been, or whether it "lapped" the CSM during the time between closest approach and redocking.

Zickzack 6y ago

> 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...

mulmen 6y ago
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 6y ago
  That's correct. He could have gotten home without the LM. (See Apollo 8, which didn't have an LM at all.)
jhgb 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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.

toyg 6y ago

> 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.

XorNot 6y ago
This might be one of the best villain "ticks" I've ever heard of.

tintor 6y ago

All of humanity in one picture except for Michael Collins: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/63ztoy/all_of_humanity_in_one_picture_except_for_michael/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/63ztoy/all_of_hu...

dredmorbius 6y ago
The OG anti-selfie.

canadianfella 6y ago

Conciseness?

Zecc 6y ago

> public conciseness That was possibly an autocorrecto for "public consciousness", but I like how well it still applies.

hutzlibu 6y ago

" 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." Well, in terms of distance maybe, but I would argue, a lone surviver on a shipwrack no one knows about, or in some dessert - would be more alone, than an astronaut, being watched and thought about by millions and in direct communication with peopke. (was communication with earth possible, when the moon was in between?)

DocTomoe 6y ago

He also, during his orbits around the moon, was the most isolated human being alive, with thousands of miles to the next humans (Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon)