Michael Collins

He was born in Rome because the Army had posted his father there as military attaché, and for 17 years the family moved wherever the Army said: Oklahoma, Governors Island, a fort near Baltimore, another near Columbus, Puerto Rico, San Antonio. In Puerto Rico a pilot let him take the controls of a Grumman Widgeon, his first time in the air. He served as an altar boy at the National Cathedral and noted later that he was probably the only astronaut never to have been a Boy Scout. West Point took him in 1948 and graduated him 185th of 527 in 1952. He chose the Air Force over his father's Army, where an uncle was chief of staff and his brother already a colonel, so nobody could call it nepotism.

NASA took him in the third astronaut group in 1963. On Gemini 10 in July 1966 he became the first person to leave a spacecraft twice on one flight, and it went wrong twice — lithium hydroxide leaked into the crew's suits and burned their eyes, and the micrometeorite collector he retrieved from an Agena floated out of the cabin and was lost. In 1968 a herniated disc in his neck put him on an operating table at Lackland and then in a brace for three months, and Jim Lovell took his seat on Frank Borman's crew, which flew around the Moon that Christmas as Apollo 8. Collins worked the launch from Mission Control instead. The consolation was Apollo 11. He drew the mission patch, wrote a 117-page book of 18 rendezvous schemes, and flew Columbia through 30 lunar orbits.

The famous phrase about him was never his. Mission Control wrote in its log that not since Adam had any human known such solitude, and Collins reported that what he actually felt on the far side was awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. In his book he insisted the venture had been built for three men and that his third was as necessary as either of the others. What did frighten him was arithmetic. If the lunar module could not lift off he would fly home alone as the mission's only survivor and be, in his words, a marked man for life. Deke Slayton offered to put him back in the rotation afterward, with a command probably at the end of it. Collins turned it down. The training was taking his family, and the goal had been met.

He left the astronaut corps for the State Department, served as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from January 1970, then took over the National Air and Space Museum in 1971 and got the building on the Mall open three days early, on July 1, 1976. He was undersecretary of the Smithsonian after that, and a major general in the Air Force Reserve until 1982. He wrote Carrying the Fire in 1974 and three more books after it. He painted watercolors of the Everglades and of aircraft, rarely of space, and for a while would not sign them. He died of cancer at home in Naples, Florida, on April 28, 2021, and his ashes went to Arlington in 2023.

Michael Collins's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gemini 10 mission
  First person to make two spacewalks on one flight 1966
• The Apollo 11 mission patch artwork
  An eagle traced from a National Geographic painting, with an olive branch added 1969
• Apollo 11 mission
  Command module pilot, aboard Columbia for 30 lunar orbits 1969
• Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys book
  His account of the flight and the life around it 1974
• The National Air and Space Museum building building
  Opened on the Mall three days ahead of schedule under his directorship 1976
• Mission to Mars book
  His case for sending people there 1990

• October 31, 1930 aged 0 Born in Rome to an American Army officer on attaché duty
• June 3, 1952 aged 21 Graduates West Point and picks the Air Force over the family's Army
• 1963 aged ~33 Selected in NASA's third group of astronauts
• July 18, 1966 aged 35 Flies Gemini 10 and makes two spacewalks in one mission Lithium hydroxide leaked into the suits and the retrieved micrometeorite collector was lost overboard.
• July 1968 aged 37 Neck surgery costs him his seat on Frank Borman's crew Jim Lovell replaced him. That crew flew Apollo 8 around the Moon in December.
• July 16, 1969 aged 38 Apollo 11 launches from Kennedy Space Center
• July 20, 1969 aged 38 Orbits alone in Columbia while Eagle lands He lost radio contact for 48 minutes of every orbit and never found the lunar module on the ground.
• July 1, 1976 aged 45 The National Air and Space Museum opens three days early
• April 28, 2021 aged 90 Dies of cancer at home in Naples, Florida

• Katherine Johnson 1918–2020
  NASA mathematician whose orbital trajectory calculations supported the Mercury and Apollo crewed flights. computed the trajectories he flew
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. set the deadline he flew to
• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. built the rocket
• Deke Slayton 1924–1993
  One of the original Mercury Seven who later directed astronaut selection and flew on the Apollo-Soyuz mission. offered him another flight
• Chuck Yeager 1923–2020
  Air Force test pilot who first exceeded the speed of sound in level flight in 1947. test-pilot lineage
• Sally Ride 1951–2012
  First American woman in space and physicist who flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. later generation of the program