by Jay Barbree
“I got my first job when I was ten. I was paid only ten cents an hour. I was happy to get it. I cut grass at the Upper Sandusky’s historic Old Mission Cemetery, and I never had the first complaint that I was only ten from its occupiers,” he laughed, “and even though I had to cut grass ten hours to make a dollar, I was the only boy around with a dollar.”
Mike Collins was the sort of man Neil naturally enjoyed rubbing elbows with—a good-humored man who enjoyed a joke while being thoughtful and articulate and learned. Neil knew Mike was born in Italy and for the first 17 years of his life, he called Rome; Oklahoma; Governors Island, New York; Puerto Rico; San Antonio, Texas; and Alexandria, Virginia, home. This alone settled the question of who was the most cosmopolitan member of the Apollo 11 crew, the one who often kidded Neil about being from a small town, which Neil countered by telling Mike that those who live out among the cows and chickens think that people who live in crowded streets and the hustle and bustle are the ones with the problems. Neil would add that anyone who lives elbow to elbow with thousands of others was missing the good sense and judgment to come in out of the rain.
* * *
As a son of an army attaché in Rome, Mike Collins was born on Halloween October 31, 1930, to Virginia Stewart Collins, a cultured, educated woman, and to Major General James L. Collins, a man who fought with General John J. Pershing in the Philippines, and again in 1916 when the Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico. Mike’s father and General Pershing chased Villa into Mexico, tracking him for seven months only to be called back with the outbreak of World War I.
But it was Mike’s uncle who became the better known. J. Lawton Collins, “Lightning Joe” as he was called, was one of General Dwight David Eisenhower’s field commanders in World War II. General “Lightning Joe” would later become chief of staff of the United States Army from August 1949 to August 1953, serving as the Army’s senior officer throughout the Korean War while Mike’s older brother, James L. Collins Jr., graduated from West Point and became a field artillery battalion commander in World War II. He won a boatload of medals—the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star, Distinguished Service Medal, and Legion of Merit. In 1965 Mike’s brother would become a brigadier, later a major general, and after Mike Collins completed his tour as an astronaut, he would carry on his family’s tradition in the military by receiving stars for his shoulders, too. Before he retired from the Air Force Reserves he received the rank of major general.
As a boy Mike’s two older sisters, Virginia and Agnes, mostly ignored their younger sibling who would finally know what an extended homelife felt like with the beginning of World War II. That’s when Mike’s family moved to Washington, D.C., where they lived for the duration of the war.
The skinny athletic 12-year-old attended the Episcopal preparatory school, St. Albans, where he captained the school’s wrestling team and in spite of his size played guard on the football team.
Mike, who was popular among his teachers and the other kids, was usually in the middle of practical jokes and fun stuff, and when graduation was behind him, in the tradition of his family, he attended West Point.
In a class of 527 cadets, Mike Collins graduated 185th in 1952, modestly admitting his record was respectable but nothing to shout about, and he joined the Air Force to avoid accusations of nepotism had he joined the Army where his uncle was chief of staff.
Mike completed his flight training and moved on for advanced-day fighter training flying F-86 Sabres and learning how to deliver nuclear weapons all the while inching his way into test-pilot school.
While flying NATO duty in the summer of 1956, Collins was forced to eject from an F-86 after a fire started aft of the cockpit. He was safely rescued. Soon after he met Patricia Finnegan, his future wife. They had three children, two daughters and a son, and once Mike had accumulated over 1,500 hours of flying, he was assigned to the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards.
He was there when NASA named its third group of astronauts in June 1963. Mike found his name on the list and in three years he went into space with John Young on Gemini 10 where they docked successfully with the Agena and he took a spacewalk and recovered a micrometeorite package.
But John Young and Mike Collins just didn’t recover one micrometeorite package—they recovered two by finding and rendezvousing with the old Gemini 8 Agena that Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had to abandon.
All of it had been a whirlwind ride for Mike Collins who was a confirmed optimist.
“I’m not at all convinced that everything is going to work out well,” Mike Collins would say, “but on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong in thinking it should.”
* * *
Like his crewmates, Apollo 11’s Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. was born in 1930. He was born a few months earlier than Neil and Mike on January 20, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
Buzz was the third child and only son of his mother Marion, whose maiden name was “Moon,” and his father Gene Aldrin, a hard-to-please man who studied physics at Clark University under Dr. Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry. In 1918, Buzz’s father earned a master’s degree at MIT in electrical engineering before becoming a pilot in the Army Air Corps, serving as an aide to General Billy Mitchell, who was regarded as the father of the Air Force and lobbied for the ability of bombers to sink battleships.
The overachieving father returned to MIT to earn a doctor of science (ScD) degree before becoming an executive with Standard Oil and battling with his son on whether or not he should attend Annapolis or West Point. Buzz won out and after turning down a full scholarship offer from MIT, he graduated third in his West Point class. His father simply asked, “Who finished first and second?”
The nickname “Buzz” originated in childhood: the younger of his two elder sisters mispronounced “brother” as “buzzer,” and this was shortened to Buzz. It was also a term used by pilots when they “buzzed”—flew low over buildings and such to announce their arrival. The name set well with the aspiring young pilot, who in 1988 made it his legal first name.
Like his father, Buzz’s ambition to excel had no bounds. Small for his age, young Aldrin picked a number of fights hoping to show he was fearless, and in neighborhood pickup football games, like a smaller Mike Collins, Buzz played with the older boys.
* * *
Following graduation from West Point, Buzz chose the Air Force and after earning his wings he fought in Korea—flying F-86 interceptors at the same time Neil Armstrong was flying his third round of Korean combat off the carrier Essex. By the time the fight ended in July 1953, Aldrin had flown 66 missions to Neil’s 78.
But unlike Neil, Buzz did tangle with a few MIGs.
For his first kill, Aldrin said, “I simply flew up behind the enemy and shot him down.” One of his gun cameras shot the first picture in the war of an enemy pilot bailing out, and Buzz’s second encounter was more daring. With his F-86E he joined a faster formation of F-86Fs on an unauthorized hit of an enemy airfield inside Manchuria. Buzz shot down his second MiG some 200 miles from base and barely made it back.
Returning from the war, Buzz Aldrin pulled several assignments with one goal in mind—the Air Force’s experimental test-pilot school at Edwards. He believed more education would help and he asked to be sent to MIT where, in three years, he completed a doctor of science degree. His thesis was “Line of Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous” and he became one of the fourteen astronauts in the third group announced October 17, 1963.
* * *
Neil did not know Buzz very well until they began playing musical chairs as the backup crew for Apollo 8, and the rumor mill sent out a story that other commanders could not work as well with Buzz as Armstrong could.
Neil simply did not find Aldrin a problem. He told me, “Buzz and I both flew in Korea. There was no question about his flying skills,” he explained. “He was smarter than most. He liked to talk things through. He was a c
reative thinker, and he was willing to make suggestions.
“Besides, NASA needed a crew that knew what it was doing,” Neil said flatly. “I didn’t need beer-drinking buddies.”
The crew Neil would take to the moon might have been a collection of misfits, but they were qualified, experienced misfits and flying with Armstrong each would know his job thoroughly.
* * *
While the flight crew operations experts were busy running simulations of the commander and the lunar module pilot getting in and out of the lander, and trying to figure out what made the most sense for the first step on the moon, Neil, Mike, and Buzz were busy training for tasks already decided.
As requested by Deke, Mike Collins spent his lion’s share of time mastering the command module while Buzz spent equal time with the lunar module including knowing what was required to set up the lunar surface experiments.
The science work fell mostly to Aldrin with the job of the actual landing on the moon left to Neil. He was convinced the best training for the lunar landing was flying the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle and he never missed an opportunity to take the LLTV up.
“The trainer was harder to fly than the lunar module, more complicated,” Neil said. “I had to land it in the wind and gusts and turbulence you don’t have on the moon, and there was concern with mastering the times when we would undock the vehicles in lunar orbit. We had to be certain the computers would know the velocities and directions of each vehicle. If the computers got fooled or lost information in that process we could be in serious trouble.
“And keeping the command module and the lunar module safely docked was another worry,” Neil explained. “There really were only three small hooks latching them together, and that’s a lot of mass even in zero G for those small hooks to be handling. It could be a concern as well as the navigation systems knowing where you are at all times. We had to be sure we didn’t drift out of outside limits. We may not be in a correct lunar orbit and we could crash into some higher-than-we-thought mountains on the backside of the moon.”
Neil and Buzz train in the lunar module simulator. (NASA)
* * *
NASA as a team had a sense of unshakable confidence but few could match the confidence of Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard. From day one of their long journey from Project Mercury to the planned lunar landings, they never faltered. Through successes and disasters, through triumphs and tragedies, through their own extremely disappointing groundings, they had only one goal. And for them there was no turning back. Together, with Deke as director of flight crew operations and Alan as chief astronaut, they selected the crews who would fly to the moon.
But NASA had yet to fly the very vehicle that would land America’s astronauts there. It was a bug-eyed spidery creature called the lunar module—LM for short—that could only be flown in the vacuum of space, and had to be flown, successfully, on Apollo 9. That meant launching the entire Apollo assembly—the command module, the service module, and the lunar module—into Earth orbit and simulating as many lunar flight procedures as possible.
Once in orbit, Apollo 9’s commander and lunar module pilot would crawl into the LM, undock the two vessels, and test the LM’s flying abilities before redocking with the command module. If it all went well, NASA would remain on schedule to land astronauts on the lunar surface before the 1960s were over if Apollo 10 could then fly a demanding dress rehearsal to the moon and back.
If nothing went awry, if the two missions were successful, if the next great booster was ready, if the Apollo spaceships were ready to go, if no one broke a leg or came down with a bug at the last moment, if, if, if, then the first landing assignment would go to Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin.
“Apollo 11’s launch was going to be a big moment no matter what our flight objectives were,” Neil told me. “Until the lunar module flew we would not know if we could communicate with two vehicles simultaneously and separate at lunar distances. We didn’t know whether the radar ranging would work. We didn’t know a lot of things, and we knew too many things could go wrong on Apollo 9 and 10.”
Mike Collins flatly didn’t think they could avoid all ifs. He bet the Las Vegas odds would put Apollo 11’s chance of getting the choice plum at only one in ten, and the odds would improve to four in ten for Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean.
Nevertheless, the flight crew operations team completed their simulation runs on how the crew should leave the lander to walk on the moon—learning that with the inward-opening door of the lunar module it would be very difficult for the LM pilot to crawl over or scoot around the commander to get outside. The team decided that after the hatch was opened, it would be safe and prudent for the LM pilot to babysit the lunar module’s systems until the flight director was absolutely certain all fluids and working parts in the lander were functioning as they should.
Then, if a problem should develop while the commander was on the surface, the LM pilot could begin readying the lunar module for liftoff and redocking while the commander grabbed a contingency sample of moon dirt and quickly returned in his bulky spacesuit to the open, unhindered area of the lander.
For the LM pilot to exit first would mean he would always be trying to maneuver around and over the commander. The flight crew operations team’s decision was obvious: The commander should leave the lunar lander first and be the last to return. The method would be used for all following Apollo missions.
* * *
Before it was decided who should be first to leave the lunar lander, Neil told me he and Buzz talked about it with Aldrin suggesting they should get involved. Neil said he was aware of the historical significance, and added, “I just don’t want to rule anything out—let’s let the flight crew ops guys do their thing.”
Unless Neil Armstrong, Deke Slayton, and Alan Shepard lied to me, Neil never lobbied to be first or offered an opinion. In his own words at one of those Apollo 11 anniversary media briefings in response to the tired old question he said, “Whatever my crewmates might think, I had zero input, no input whatever into that decision,” and to this reporter’s knowledge, Buzz never officially challenged the decision.
And when it came to that lingering charge by some in the media that Buzz did not take a picture of Neil on the moon because he was angry, Neil stood up for Buzz. He told me, “I was the one with the camera. Buzz was busy every minute setting up the experiments and when he was done, near the end of our EVA, I handed Buzz the camera and he took some shots—one especially I like of me loading rocks on the LM.”
Meanwhile another related question was making the rounds in official Washington.
It was reported the new president Richard Nixon was concerned that some overly ambitious Apollo commander, thinking this was his one and only shot at landing on the moon, might take unwise chances. Mr. Nixon, a space program supporter, asked the NASA administrator to tell Neil Armstrong if conditions became unsafe for the landing he was to abort, and the new president promised him he would get another mission—he would get another attempt to land on the moon.
Neil liked that, but knew he would never take chances with the lives of his crew.
I asked Neil if the story was true.
“Yep,” he said, adding, “I was also told he made the same commitment to later crews.”
* * *
When it came to training for the moon landings, Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard had one more message for their Apollo astronauts: “You people are going to live in the simulators and you’re going to fly your own mission a couple of hundred times before you finally go out and launch.” Deke and Alan demanded everything of them except corporal punishment and a few hundred push-ups. While one crew was training on the LLTV and on other exercises, another crew would be in the simulators. “You’ll all follow the others’ moves and listen to every detail of the debriefings. Ask all the questions you can muster.” Deke continued, “Remember there is no dumb question and you’ll keep learning from each other and like a growing s
nowball rolling down a mountain, gathering snow all the way, you’ll be doing the same. You’ll be gathering experience and information for your own flight. Remember the Russians are damn well not standing still.
“Our recon satellites have photographed one of their big N-1s on the launchpad,” Deke told them, adding, “It’s almost as big as the Saturn V, and if they can get the damn thing to fly, they can still beat us to a moon landing.
“We did great with Apollo 8,” he assured them, “but we haven’t won this thing by a long shot. Let’s get cracking.”
N-1 launches. The Russians are coming. (Russian Federal Space Agency)
SIXTEEN
REHEARSAL FINALS
A tall rocket gantry towered over the vast steppes of Kazakhstan. It was located on the out-of-the-way backside of Russia’s sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome. Despite its towering height it went unnoticed, hiding Russia’s secrets. Only a window from space had a view thanks to an American Discoverer photoreconnaissance satellite staring down from its passing orbit. It blinked and took pictures of the rocket standing nearly as tall as the Saturn V.
Russian officialdom called their monster N-1. Famed Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolyov, the father of the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik, worked in secret to prepare it for its job to boost history’s first spacewalker, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, to the moon—get him there and back before the astronauts landed.
But for Russia there was a setback.
America’s Project Gemini was flying its final missions when Korolyov suddenly died in 1966. Unfortunately for the Soviets he left N-1’s development without a firm hand on the tiller. Soon Russia’s program to reach the moon was shredding itself. Without Korolyov, rockets were rushed to flight before they were ready. They exploded on the ground and in the air, and the Zond program to simply fly around the moon? It was abandoned in the wake of Apollo 8.