Michael Collins (October 31, 1930-April 28, 2021) was an American astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 command module Columbia around the Moon in 1969 while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, made the first crewed landing on the surface.
He was also a test pilot and major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserves.
Collins graduated from the United States Military Academy with the Class of 1952. He joined the United States Air Force, and flew F-86 Sabre fighters at Chambley-Bussières Air Base, France. He was accepted into the U.S. Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1960, also graduating from the Aerospace Research Pilot School (Class III).
Selected as part of NASA's third group of 14 astronauts in 1963, Collins flew in space twice. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 10 in 1966, in which he and Command Pilot John Young performed orbital rendezvous with two spacecraft and undertook two extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks).
On the 1969 Apollo 11 mission he became one of 24 people to fly to the Moon, which he orbited thirty times. He was the fourth person (and third American) to perform a spacewalk, the first person to have performed more than one spacewalk, and, after Young, who flew the command module on Apollo 10, the second person to orbit the Moon alone.
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After retiring from NASA in 1970, Collins took a job in the Department of State as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. A year later, he became the director of the National Air and Space Museum, and held this position until 1978, when he stepped down to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1980, he took a job as vice president of LTV Aerospace. He resigned in 1985 to start his own consulting firm.
Along with his Apollo 11 crewmates, Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011.
Collins was born on October 31, 1930, in Rome, Italy. He was the second son of James Lawton Collins (1882-1963), a career U.S. Army officer, who was the U.S. military attaché there from 1928 to 1932, and Virginia C. née Stewart (1895-1987). Collins had an older brother, James Lawton Collins Jr. (1917-2002), and two older sisters, Virginia and Agnes.
Collins' decision to join the United States Air Force (USAF) was motivated by both the wonder of what the next fifty years might bring in aeronautics, and to avoid accusations of nepotism had he joined the Army -where his brother was already a colonel, his father had reached the rank of major general and his uncle, General J. Lawton Collins (1896-1987), was the Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
The inspiration for Collins in his decision to become a NASA astronaut was the Mercury Atlas 6 flight of John Glenn on February 20, 1962, and the thought of being able to circle the Earth in 90 minutes.
Collins applied for the second group of astronauts that year. To raise the numbers of Air Force pilots selected, the Air Force sent their best applicants to a charm school. Medical and psychiatric examinations at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, and interviews at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston followed. In mid-September, he found out he had not been accepted. It was a blow even though he did not expect to be selected.
Collins rated the second group of nine as better than the Mercury Seven who preceded them, or the five groups that followed, including his own.
After this basic training, the third group were assigned specializations. Collins received his first choice: pressure suits and extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks). His job was to monitor development and act as a liaison between the Astronaut Office and contractors. He was disturbed by the secretive planning of Ed White's EVA on Gemini 4, because he was not involved despite being the person with the greatest knowledge of the subject.
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Shortly after Gemini 10, Collins was assigned to the backup crew for the second crewed Apollo flight, with Borman as commander (CDR), Stafford as command module pilot (CMP), and Collins as lunar module pilot (LMP). Along with learning the new Apollo command and service module (CSM) and the Apollo Lunar Module (LM), Collins received helicopter training, as these were thought to be the best way to simulate the landing approach of the LM.
The mission patch of Apollo 11 was the creation of Collins. Jim Lovell, the backup commander, mentioned the idea of eagles, a symbol of the United States.
Collins liked the idea and found a painting by artist Walter A. Weber in a National Geographic Society book, Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America, traced it and added the lunar surface below and Earth in the background. The idea of an olive branch, a symbol of peace, came from a computer expert at the simulators. The call sign Columbia for the CSM came from Julian Scheer, the NASA Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs. He mentioned the idea to Collins in a conversation and Collins could not think of anything better.
On August 12, 1946, Congress passed an authorization bill for a National Air Museum, to be administered by the Smithsonian Institution, and located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Under the U.S. legislative system, authorization is insufficient; Congress also has to pass an appropriation bill allocating funding. Since this was not done, there was no money for the museum building.
Collins held the directorship until 1978, when he stepped down to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. During this time, although no longer an active-duty USAF officer after he joined the State Department in 1970, he remained in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He attained the rank of major general in 1976, and retired in 1982.
On April 28, 2021, Collins died in Naples, Florida, at the age of 90.
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I think a future flight should include a poet,
a priest and a philosopher...
We might get a much better idea of what we saw.
Michael Collins
