Flying to the Moon

by Michael Collins

  When I got my wings, after a most enjoyable year of flight training, I also got some great news. I was not only going to be a fighter pilot, but I was going to Las Vegas, Nevada, where training was given in the very best fighter, the F-86 Sabrejet. At that time (1953) the Sabres were battling the MIGs in Korea, and doing it very successfully. More than anything, I wanted to fly the sleek, swept-wing supersonic F-86, and I was delighted when I got my chance. Although trickier to fly than the Shooting Star, it was also more fun, it had only one seat, and above all, you knew it was the best. We new pilots felt honored to have a chance to master it, and we worked hard to learn as much as we could as fast as we could. Unfortunately, a few of my friends were killed in the process. Today flying is a lot safer, especially on airliners, but fighters have always been more difficult, especially in the early jet days.

  After graduating from Las Vegas, I flew the F-86 for four years, accumulating over a thousand flying hours in it. I got to see some interesting parts of the world from the cockpit of an F-86, all the way from the Mexican border to the eastern Mediterranean Sea. I saw the Libyan Desert, where nomads tend their camels as they did a thousand years ago. I saw pieces of the great Greenland glacier cracking and falling into the sea to make icebergs. I saw the lush green of Ireland, and the bright blue sea of the Greek islands, and the yellow-gray haze of industrialized Germany. I saw Paris and London and Rome. I saw strange places and met people whose viewpoints were different from mine. I liked being an Air Force pilot. My sister’s husband was a pilot also, but he was a test pilot. His work, flying all kinds of new airplanes, sounded even better than what I was doing with my old F-86. So I went back to school, something I had never expected to do again, to learn how to be a test pilot, at the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

  Fortunately, in high school and college I had taken a fair number of math and science courses, because now I needed them to understand how airplanes really flew, and what made the difference between a good airplane and a bad one. I had never thought about that before. By the time I had gotten my hands on an airplane, the test pilots had already wrung it out and had made sure that it was safe for me to fly. Now I had that responsibility, to check everything from A to Z, so that when a new airplane entered squadron service, there would be no surprises waiting for the new boy, the inexperienced second lieutenant. At the Test Pilot School I learned how to get as much information as possible from a new airplane in the shortest possible time. When I graduated, I stayed on at Edwards Air Force Base, and was assigned to the Fighter Test section. This was exactly what I wanted, but I was a little disappointed because at that time there weren’t any new fighters to test. Instead, I spent my time flying older planes which were being modified in various ways. It was interesting flying, and I got a chance to fly such airplanes as the North American F-100 Super Sabre, the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, and quite a few others.

  I really liked my job as a test pilot; in fact, I thought it was the best possible job I could have, except for one thing. There were other people going a lot higher and faster than I was. They were called astronauts, and they had been picked from the ranks of test pilots. There were only seven of them, and I didn’t know any of them, but some of my test pilot friends did, and told me stories about them. I was surprised to hear that they weren’t supermen at all, but just test pilots (admittedly, a bit older and more experienced), who made mistakes just like the rest of us. I wondered what it would take to become an astronaut. The Air Force must have been wondering the same thing too, because at this time they renamed the Test Pilot School and started calling it by a much more fancy name—the Aerospace Research Pilot School. They also began teaching “space” courses, and they invited me to come back to the school to take some of them. So I became a student once again, and learned about what keeps satellites in orbit, and about how weightlessness affects the human body, and about how to fly machines without wings. After graduating I went back to my old job in Fighter Test, and waited until the Space Agency decided they needed some more astronauts. I only had a couple of months to wait before NASA announced it was going to hire a third group of astronauts. I had tried the year before to become a NASA astronaut, and had been rejected, but this time I was hopeful— because of the space courses I had taken—that I knew more than before, and that NASA would take me.

  The first thing I had to do was pass a physical exam that took a whole week. It was not a pleasant week, because I worried the entire time that they would find something wrong with me. Also, some of the tests were not pleasant. They took what seemed like a quart of blood, poured cold water in my ears (that makes you dizzy), and performed a lot of other tests which I didn’t even understand. They checked the condition of my heart by making me walk on a treadmill that they adjusted to get steeper and steeper as the minutes went by. They stopped the treadmill when my heartbeat got up to 180 beats per minute, which is pretty fast. I also took written mental tests and had interviews with psychiatrists. Some of the questions seemed strange, like: “Are you a slob or a snob?” You had to pick one or the other. I picked “snob,” although I don’t think I am one. Somehow I didn’t want to pick “slob.”

  After a week in San Antonio, Texas, where the physical exam took place, I went to Houston for an interview. It was conducted by Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, two of the original seven astronauts, and some other technical experts. The questions were designed to see how much we knew about NASA’s plans for flying in space, and to determine what (if anything) we might contribute, based on our experience as pilots. I had studied a lot about Gemini and Apollo, the two spacecraft which were supposed to fly next (after Mercury), and I thought I gave good answers to most of the questions. But some I did not know; for example, I knew practically nothing about the Atlas booster, the one that was used to put a Mercury spacecraft into orbit. Incidentally, the astronauts always call their machines spacecraft, not capsules. Capsules are something you swallow.

  I went back to Edwards Air Force Base after the interview and began the long wait to hear whether or not I would be rejected again. I figured this was my last chance, because I was just one year below the age limit of thirty-four, and I thought it would be years and years before NASA would pick any more astronauts. They already had sixteen—the original seven plus a second group of nine. After a month of waiting and worrying, I got a phone call from Deke Slayton. He said they would take me, if I still wanted to work for NASA. If I still wanted to? He must have been kidding—I had been thinking about nothing else for the whole month. Deke didn’t sound the slightest bit excited, but I certainly was, and so was my wife when I told her. She also had been nervous during the long wait. Our oldest child, Kate, was only four years old, too young to understand what was happening. I soon found out that NASA had selected fourteen of us. These men would all become close friends in the coming years. They were a grand group of people, easy to live and work with, and I enjoyed being with them. Their names were Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders, Charlie Bassett, Al Bean, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee, Walt Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Ted Freeman, Dick Gordon, Dave Scott, Rusty Schweickart, and C. C. Williams. And, oh yes, I almost forgot, Mike Collins. Of this group of fourteen, three would orbit the earth, three orbit the moon, four walk on the moon, and four would get killed. There is a lot of luck in this life.

  3

  My wife and three children (Kate, Ann, and Michael) and I moved to Houston in January of 1964. NASA was building a new center there, called the Manned Spacecraft Center. The astronauts’ offices were being moved into a brand-new building and I was assigned my own small office, with a big gray metal desk, several large bookcases, and a small blackboard on one wall. Inside the desk there were lots of pencils, a ruler, and several yellow pads of paper. That was all the equipment you needed to become an astronaut, or at least to start becoming an astronaut. No one told me how I should be spending every minute of every day; I had to decide that for myself. I decided to begin by lea
rning as much as I could about the history of the space program, about Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, and to find out what was bothering the engineers who were designing the spacecraft of the future.

  One nice thing about studying the space program in 1964 was that it was quite new, and one didn’t have to go back very far in the history books to learn about it. Of course, people like Jules Verne (and how many before him?) had been dreaming of flying to the moon for centuries, and the Chinese had had small rockets for seven hundred years. But it had only been fairly recently that man had begun to think seriously about using rocket power to leave the surface of the earth. Piston and jet engines are of no use in space, because they require air to operate (to mix with the fuel before burning) and there is no air above the earth’s atmosphere, in the vacuum of space. A rocket solves this problem by carrying everything it needs with it, not only fuel but also the oxidizer needed to mix with the fuel and cause it to burn. It was the twentieth century before people thought seriously about this, and there were three men who seemed to be ahead of everyone else in the world.

  The first was a Russian by the name of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was born in 1857. Tsiolkovsky was almost totally deaf, and because of this handicap he had a very difficult time getting an education. He couldn’t get into the best schools, but spent so much time studying on his own at the public library in Moscow that he was given a job as a schoolteacher. In his free time he designed a wide variety of airships and spacecraft. None of them ever flew, but their theoretical possibilities were very far advanced. For example, he thought plants should be grown aboard spacecraft, to purify the air. When man finally decides to live in space, I expect that he will do exactly what Tsiolkovsky recommended, and use plants to produce oxygen for the crew to breathe. The crew will return the favor by exhaling carbon dioxide, which (along with sunlight and water) plants need to live. Scientists, who love to give long names to things, call this process photosynthesis. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky died in 1935, and the Russians made a museum out of his house. I visited there recently and talked to Tsiolkovsky’s grandson. Visitors not only can learn a lot about Tsiolkovsky’s plans for flying into space but can also see how he lived on earth. Even his bicycle has been saved, and the tin ear trumpet, nearly two feet long, which poor deaf Konstantin used to hold up to his ear for his students to speak into.

  In the United States the great pioneer of rocketry was Robert Hutchings Goddard, who was born in Massachusetts in 1882—the same year my dad was born. One day when he was seventeen, Goddard was up in a cherry tree, trimming the branches, when he suddenly thought how wonderful it would be to make a machine that could ascend all the way to Mars. He didn’t know how to do it, but when he climbed down from that tree he felt he was a different boy. Life now had a purpose for him. Goddard realized that to fulfill that purpose he needed to get an education, and he pursued his studies all the way to a Ph. D. degree. Unlike Tsiolkovsky, who concentrated on theory, Goddard built rockets. In 1926 he flew the world’s first lipuid-rocket-propelled vehicle (remember that the Chinese and others had used solid propellants, not unlike the Fourth of July variety). The more successful Goddard’s rockets became, the more noise they made. Finally the police got so many complaints from his neighbors that they told him he couldn’t shoot off any more rockets in that neighborhood. Goddard solved the problem by moving to the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, where he could fire his rockets in peace. They only went up to about 9,000 feet, but that was still better than anyone else in the world could do in the nineteen-thirties. They were the ancestors of the gigantic Saturn V moon rocket.

  The third rocket genius was a German named Hermann Oberth. He is the only one of the three who is still alive, although he retired long ago. Oberth figured out the mathematical equations which proved that space flight was practical. His ideas also led to the founding of a Society for Spaceship Travel, whose members tried experimenting with small liquid-propelled rockets which were generally recovered by parachutes. In World War II, Germany built on Oberth’s ideas and developed the V-2, a rocket powerful enough to carry an explosive warhead all the way from northern Germany to London. After World War II, Wernher Von Braun, the leader of this effort, came to the United States with some of his experts and began building rockets in this country. Their work did not receive much attention until October 4, 1957, when the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite in history. Sputnik came as a great shock to the world, because (despite Tsiolkovsky’s work) Russia was considered to be a backward nation, especially in the area of advanced technology. Sputnik weighed 184 pounds, and obviously required a very large rocket to accelerate this mass to a sufficient speed to achieve orbit. The United States couldn’t even put a flea into orbit, much less 184 pounds, but people like Von Braun were working on it, and when they heard about the Russian success, they started working even harder. The space race was on!

  Early in 1958, the United States put up its first satellite, Explorer I, and it wasn’t long before people started talking about putting a man into orbit. Project Mercury was designed to do that, but again the Russians got there first, and put the first human being into orbit. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin made one circle around the earth in 89 minutes. Yuri was a very personable young man, friendly, with a big smile, and he became a hero in Russia and a celebrity in all parts of the world. He was killed flying a MIG-15 jet trainer in 1968. Alan Shepard was the first American in space, followed closely by Gus Grissom, but these two flights were not intended to go into orbit, but simply to fly a ballistic arc up a bit over one hundred miles and then fall back down into the sea. John Glenn was the first Mercury astronaut to circle the earth, making three orbits. Then came Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra, and finally Gordon Cooper finished up the Mercury program in May 1963, staying up for thirty-four hours.

  The Mercury astronauts were allowed to name their spacecraft. All the names ended with a 7, since there were but seven astronauts in existence, and they wanted to emphasize their unity. The names they picked were Freedom 7, Liberty Bell 7, Friendship 7, Aurora 7, Sigma 7, and Faith 7. An aurora is a group of flashing lights in the sky, usually seen only on clear nights in the far north. Sigma is one of the letters of the Greek alphabet which is used frequently in mathematics to indicate the sum of various parts. In this case I guess it indicated the sum of all the work that many people put into the launch of a manned spacecraft.

  Between Cooper’s flight in 1963 and my arrival in Houston in 1964, there had been no more space flights. A second group of nine astronauts had been picked, and now my group of fourteen, so there were thirty of us, instead of seven, and we were all eager to fly in space, especially we rookies. The reason none of us was doing so was that Project Mercury had ended and Project Gemini had not yet begun. President Kennedy had said (shortly after Alan Shepard’s flight in 1961) that we should send a man to the moon, and return him safely to earth—before the end of the decade. We all knew that, but the problem was there were a number of questions that had to be answered before we could try a lunar trip. The two-man Gemini spacecraft was being designed to find out as much as we could in earth orbit before trying to take an Apollo spacecraft all the way to the moon.

  The biggest unknown was what would happen to a man who stayed weightless for a long time. Some doctors thought the heart and blood-supply system would become confused by the lack of gravity and would not function properly. It is not possible to create weightlessness here on earth, except for very short periods of time. One way would be to jump off a tall building, in which case you would be weightless until you hit the ground. I don’t recommend that! A second way, which we did try, was to dive down in a speeding jet until it got going very fast, pull up abruptly into a steep climb, and then push over into a lazy arc in the shape of a parabola. For approximately twenty seconds near the top of the arc, you and your plane would be weightless. Those twenty seconds were the most experience we had, until Mercury began with Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute flight. Then the flights go
t longer, until finally Cooper stayed up nearly a day and a half, with no apparent ill effects. But a round trip to the moon would take over a week, and no one was willing to guarantee that a man’s body wouldn’t somehow be damaged by being weightless that long. Also, the Russian cosmonauts were reported to be having some problems with nausea. Therefore, Gemini was created to find out once and for all, by keeping two men up for fourteen days. Of course, this long flight would be undertaken only if no harm came to the astronauts on the earlier Gemini flights, which were scheduled to stay up for four days, and then eight days.

  The second most important unknown was the question of rendezvous and docking. The Apollo machinery was being designed with two separate spacecraft, which would rendezvous and dock with each other while in orbit around the moon. But no one had ever made a space rendezvous or docking! Was it practical to plan Apollo that way? Could two vehicles speeding around earth or moon really find each other, get into the same orbit at the same speed, and gently bring their two craft together? Could they do it every time they tried, or only when they were lucky? We had to know these things, as well as the effects of weightlessness on the human body, before we could safely obey President Kennedy’s order to get to the moon by the end of the decade.

  A third thing we hoped to learn from Project Gemini was how to operate outside a spacecraft. We wanted men to walk on the airless moon, not just to land and stay inside their spacecraft, and that meant that experience had to be gained working inside a pressure suit containing its own atmosphere. Of course, we couldn’t “moon walk” during Gemini, but we could “space walk” and find out how to design portable breathing and cooling equipment.