Astronaut Shares The Looming Fear That Nearly Broke Him While In Space
When most people think of Apollo 11, they think of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the astronauts who stepped foot on the moon and took that giant leap for mankind. What many of us forget, however, is that there was a third astronaut on the mission, and he may have had the scariest job of all. Michael Collins spent hours alone in space, where he was surrounded by one, all-consuming fear...
Astronaut Mike Collins
“I’m a big believer in luck,” Mike Collins once said. “Luck should be put on my gravestone.” But from his perch in Columbia, the command module he hoped would eventually reunite him with Armstrong and Aldrin, Collins didn’t exactly feel lucky. He was too focused on the mission...and on everything that could go wrong.
The man for the job
It was this kind of thinking, devoid of ego, that made Collins a brilliant test pilot-turned-astronaut in the first place. So in the ‘60s, when setting foot on the moon sounded less like fiction and more like a reality, it was Collins’ down-to-earth personality that made him the man for the job.
Apollo 11
Well, one of the men, anyway. After acting as a capsule communicator for Apollo 8, Collins was added to the team that, NASA secretly hoped, would make history on the moon: Apollo 11. The three astronauts chosen for the job — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Collins — immediately started preparing for the history-making mission.
Didn't know what to expect
There were plans in place, but given the unusual setting of, you know, the moon, they couldn’t exactly do genuine run-throughs of the mission. All they could do was try to anticipate any situation — which was another question mark. How can you know what to expect in space?
