Learning that they were to be a part of Apollo 11 was not one of the presents Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin opened on Christmas morning 1968. The two men did not find out about their assignment, in fact, until the Monday after New Year’s. On January 4, 1969, Slayton called the two men into his office where Armstrong was already on hand and told them they were being named the prime crew for Apollo 11. Neil recalls that Deke said it was “conceivable and may work out that this will be the first lunar landing attempt.” Deke then added that he wanted them to conduct their preparation for the flight on the assumption that the landing was going to happen, so that, if it did, they would be totally ready to carry it out.
“We responded accordingly,” Aldrin remarks, “trying to maintain a façade of business as usual while adrenaline sped through our bodies.” “We thought it was great,” Armstrong states. “It was going to be a great flight whatever the mission profile turned out to be.” The possibility of being part of the first landing crew “must have been in everybody’s mind to some extent, but I don’t remember ever focusing on it. I was happy just being there and doing whatever jobs I got.”
NASA announced the Apollo 11 crew to the public five days later, on January 9. The announcement came following ceremonies in which the Apollo 8 crewmen were awarded medals from President Johnson at the White House and received standing ovations at a joint meeting of Congress attended by the president’s cabinet, the Supreme Court justices, and the diplomatic corps. Before Congress, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman described the mission as a “triumph of mankind,” not just an American triumph. Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin were not present in Washington when, as many newspapers put it, the “Moon Team Is Named.” They did appear at an Apollo 11 press briefing in Houston the next day. “Our intent is to train to make a lunar landing.” Slayton told the reporters. “Whether we do or not will depend upon how the D mission goes and how the F mission goes. We could be flying one of those missions on Apollo 11 instead of the lunar mission. But these are the first guys who will be concentrating the greatest extent on getting a landing done.”
Mike Collins later called himself, Armstrong, and Aldrin “amiable strangers,” a phrase by all accounts that can be applied justifiably to no other crew. This makes Apollo 11 unique not only in terms of its historic mission but also in terms of how unusually the crew related to one another, to their colleagues in NASA, and even to the outside world.
Michael Collins was easily the trio’s most lighthearted member. His upbringing was also the most cosmopolitan, thanks to his father’s distinguished military career. The son of an army attaché in Rome, Mike was born in the Celestial City on October 31, 1930, in an apartment just off Via Veneto overlooking the Borghese Gardens. His father, General James L. Collins, had fought with General John J. Pershing in the Philippines and in the 1916 Mexican campaign against Pancho Villa. In France during World War I, Collins Sr., then an aide to “Black Jack” Pershing, won the Silver Star. Young Michael’s uncle, J. Lawton Collins, became even more renowned as a soldier. As “Lightning Joe” Collins, he fought as one of General Dwight Eisenhower’s corps commanders in Europe during the Second World War. Following the war, Lightning Joe became the army chief of staff.
Like Armstrong, Mike moved around a lot as a boy. An army brat, he never had a hometown to speak of. When he was a year and a half old, his parents returned to the States, where his father posted in Oklahoma. From there, the family moved to Governors Island in New York Bay, to Fort Hoyle outside Baltimore, followed by stops at Fort Hays, Ohio, near Columbus, in San Antonio, Texas, and in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Also as with Armstrong, the itinerant life of his family did not affect him at all adversely. San Antonio, he felt, had “something extra going for it.” At Fort Hoyle near the Chesapeake Bay, “There were horses to ride, and woods to tramp through and, best of all, fishing [with] crabs for bait.” In San Juan, where his father was commanding general of a military department that included not only Puerto Rico but some of the Virgin Islands and parts of the West Indies, the family lived in what reputedly was the second-oldest house in the Western Hemisphere, over four hundred years old. “It was an immense place,” Collins remembers, “with extraordinary ‘play places’ for a boy ten years old. A house of ill-repute was right there [outside the enclosed military area]. The girls used to toss me money if I would come down and talk to them, but I never would. I was scared to death. I’m afraid a lot of their profits got converted into ice cream cones for me.”
Mike had three siblings. The oldest was James L. Collins Jr., thirteen years older. Mike was not yet five when his brother went off to West Point, graduating in 1939. In World War II, James was a field artillery battalion commander who won the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star, Distinguished Service Medal, and Legion of Merit. In 1965 he became a brigadier general. Mike’s two sisters, Virginia and Agnes, were six and ten years older than he and not of a mind to traipse around with their precocious little brother. So he spent a lot of time playing by himself, enlivening his imagination. His mother, Virginia Stewart Collins, was a cultured, educated woman whose Scottish-English family had come to America prior to the American Revolution. Her lasting influence over her youngest child included her love of books and admiration for the beauty of the English language.
In 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the family moved to Washington, DC, where it remained for the duration of the war. Mike was sent off to an Episcopal preparatory school, St. Albans, adjacent to Washington’s National Cathedral. A tall, skinny, athletic boy, he captained the school’s wrestling team and played guard on the football team. His grades were only slightly above average. “I was just a normal, active, troublesome kid. I liked airplanes and kites and climbing trees and falling out of them. I didn’t like school much. I usually looked sleepy in the classroom, and the school yearbook poked fun at me about that. I was an altar boy at the cathedral and I had to get up for the 6:30 A.M. service; I never did seem to catch up on sleep. Reading was something else, though. I discovered books when I was about eleven, and it was just like somebody had turned on the light or opened the door.”
All the kids liked him, as did his teachers, even though he was usually the prime suspect in whatever mischief took place, playing his innocence to humorous effect. He had a gift for leadership, for getting along with others, for thinking clearly, and for expressing himself with “intellectual precision.”
Given the family’s military tradition, Collins might have been pressured to go into the army when he graduated high school in 1948. Yet to the extent that his father exerted any influence on him, it was to keep him away from military service. “He was a very independent cuss himself,” Mike asserts, “and he raised his kids to think independently. He didn’t want me to do something just because it seemed the thing to do. My mother liked the field of diplomacy as a profession better than the military; I think she was trying to steer me subtly toward foreign service with the State Department. I can recall thinking I might want to be a doctor. In the end I chose West Point because I wanted to go to college and I knew West Point was a first-class education. Also it was free. You don’t get rich in the service.”
In a class of 527 cadets, Collins finished 185th, which was in the top third (or 28th percentile). Graduating in 1952, he was in the same class as Ed White. Frank Borman was two years ahead of him, Buzz Aldrin one year behind. With typical humorous modesty, Collins admits that his academic record was respectable but not stellar: “I do about as well in liberal arts as I do in the sciences, and I don’t do particularly well in any of them. I’d rather do something than study about it or talk about it.”
As a West Point graduate, he was committed to four years of active duty. “I chose the air force because it sounded more exciting and innovative [than the army].” By 1956, First Lieutenant Collins was a part of a fighter squadron flying F-86s in Chambley, France, and had gotten to very much like what he was doing. In fighter pilots, he found kindred spirits. “I
like fighter pilots, I really do,” Collins exclaimed to Life reporter Dodie Hamblin in an interview prior to the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.
He also got very much to like a slim, dark, attractive woman he met one night at the Chambley officers’ mess. Spotting her at the bar, Mike walked over and said, “Hi, I’m Mike Collins. Do you live here?” The young woman, twenty-one years old, was Patricia Finnegan. The oldest of eight children, Pat had grown up in suburban Boston within a staunchly Roman Catholic family full of lawyers and politicians. After graduating from all-girls Emmanuel College, where she majored in English, she did social work with Aid to Dependent Children, working mostly with unwed mothers. Two and a half years later, wishing to see a little of the world but not having the money to travel very comfortably, Pat took a job that sent her to France with the air force service club. Before meeting Mike at Chambley, she had dated a doctor and a dentist. As soon as Mike spoke to her, she knew he was different: “He loved to eat and he understood French food and introduced me to a lot of things that I wouldn’t have tried by myself. Some of the Americans were joining wine study clubs, but Mike didn’t have to. He had learned a lot about wines from his father, and he had studied up on vineyards so he could tell wonderful stories about them. In fact he could talk about everything. He knew books; he knew poetry; he was interested in theater. He was bright about technical things, and he was lots and lots of fun. I couldn’t get over all this combination in one man.”
What Pat Finnegan most liked about Mike Collins was his approach to life: “It was, and still is, that everything will be okay; that everything will work out.”
Quickly overcoming the matter of religion—Pat was ultra-Catholic, Mike was nominally Episcopalian—the young couple got engaged. Mike’s letter to Pat’s father in Boston, Joseph Finnegan, ran six sentences long. “Never,” Joe Finnegan later told Pat and Mike when giving his approval to their marriage, “had [I] seen such a good lawyer’s brief in six sentences.”
Plans for a June 1956 wedding did not work out. The Hungarian Revolution intervened, and Mike’s squadron was redeployed to Germany. The marriage waited until the summer of 1957.
Deciding to make the air force his career, Collins determined to become a test pilot. He considered it not only a way to stay settled and stateside but as the ultimate job in flying. “You can be irresponsible and you may get away with it being a fighter pilot; but you most certainly cannot as a test pilot. Fighter pilots can be impetuous; test pilots can’t. They have to be more mature, a little bit smarter. They have to give more thought to what they’re doing, or they’re going to—well, maybe not kill themselves, but, even worse, they’ll come to wrong conclusions about airplanes and others will kill themselves later when the aircraft reach squadron service. They have to be more deliberate, better trained—and they’re not as much fun as fighter pilots.”
While still based in Europe, Collins applied for the air force test pilot school at Edwards. Not until 1961 (the year that Chuck Yeager returned to Edwards as deputy director of the flight test operation, prior to Yeager’s becoming the school’s commandant the following year) did the school admit him. With the Space Age under way and the X-15 and Mercury spacecraft now flying, the school had just changed its name to the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) and begun to build a program designed to train U.S. military test pilots for spaceflight. Collins became part of ARPS Class III. With him in Class III were Charlie Bassett, the astronaut killed with Elliot See in 1966, and Joe Engle, who eventually became the only person to fly into space in two different winged vehicles, the X-15 and the Space Shuttle. In the ARPS class right behind him were Ted Freeman, Jim Irwin, and Dave Scott. In all, twenty-six graduates of the air force test pilot school came to earn astronaut’s wings by flying in the Gemini, Apollo, or Space Shuttle programs.
When NASA named its third group of astronauts in June 1963, Collins was one of them, specializing in pressure suits and extravehicular activity. For the December 1965 flight of Gemini VII, he served as Jim Lovell’s backup. Mike’s first spaceflight came in July 1966 on Gemini X, an exciting mission that achieved a successful docking with the Agena target vehicle during which Collins performed a space walk that retrieved a micrometeorite package that Dave Scott on Gemini VIII had been unable to bring back due to the spacecraft’s in-flight emergency. Mike’s first Apollo assignment was backup to Walt Cunninghan on the second Apollo flight. In the shakeup after the launchpad fire, Collins was to be the command module pilot for what became Apollo 8. Due to a dangerous bone spur in his spinal column, however, which required surgery in June 1968, he was replaced on Apollo 8 by Jim Lovell. Thanks to a very successful surgery and rapid recovery, he got paired with Armstrong and Aldrin for Apollo 11.
If all of this sounds like a whirlwind ride for Collins, from a fighter pilot who had a hard time getting into test pilot school to the astronaut who was serving as the command module pilot for the first lunar landing, all in less than eight years, it was exactly that.
Having progressed so far so fast, having grown up in such interesting surroundings, having had such supportive parents, and having had the very good fortune to have met and married such an intelligent and beautiful wife, it was no wonder that Mike Collins was an optimist, if not an eternal one: “I’m not always convinced that everything is going to work out well. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong in acting as if things will work out. I mean, if I tell my wife I believe in the Easter Bunny—well, why not? Either he exists or he doesn’t, and I choose to believe. But if you really cornered me, I’d have to admit reluctantly that there is no Easter Bunny. Maybe.”
Collins was the sort of man whom Armstrong naturally liked. He was good humored and liked to joke; yet he was very thoughtful, articulate, and learned. Long after the Apollo 11 mission, Mike would comment: “A closer relationship, while certainly not necessary for the success or happy completion of a spaceflight, would seem more ‘normal’ to me. Even as a self-acknowledged loner, I feel a bit freakish about our tendency as a crew to transfer only essential information, rather than thoughts or feelings.”
Born January 30, 1930, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey,* Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. was the third child and only son of a man who was himself quite remote and distant—not to mention resolute and hard to please. The senior Aldrin (born 1896) had been a pilot in the army air corps during World War I. He had served as an aide to General Billy Mitchell, the outspoken and abrasive advocate of a separate U.S. air force who came before army court-martial in 1925. He was a highly educated man. Before going into the military, Gene Aldrin had studied physics at Clark University under Dr. Robert H. Goddard, the father of American rocketry. In 1918, he earned a master’s degree at MIT in electrical engineering, writing a fifty-five-page thesis under Professor A. E. Kennelly on the behavior of electrically heated wires, a topic with applications to telephone transmission, internal combustion engines, and aviation instrumentation. He later returned to MIT on military assignment, finishing a doctor of science (ScD) degree in1928. Resigning from the air corps in 1928, Aldrin Sr. became a stockbroker. At the top of the bull market in August 1929, just three months before the Wall Street crash, he somehow had the clairvoyance to sell all his stock and purchase a large three-story, seven-bedroom house on a corner of Princeton Place in Montclair, New Jersey, eighteen miles northwest of Manhattan.
Gene Aldrin met his wife Marion while serving under General Mitchell in the Philippines, where he was in charge of putting together airplanes out of spare parts left over from World War I. Propitiously, at least for the son she would bear, Marion’s maiden name was Moon. The perfectly groomed, blond, blue-eyed daughter of a strict Methodist minister who served as a chaplain in the army, Marion Gaddys Moon Aldrin possessed an independent spirit that often conflicted with her husband’s own strong determination. Prior to Buzz, she gave birth to two daughters, Madeline, four years older, and Fay Ann, a year and a half older. Being the only boy, the two sisters called him “Brother.” Little Fay Ann, just learn
ing to speak, could not quite manage the word, which came out as “Buzzer.” The nickname got shortened to Buzz.
Whereas the key to understanding Armstrong’s personality lay primarily in understanding his relationship with his mother, the secret to understanding Buzz Aldrin rests in his feelings about his father. Buzz’s autobiographical 1973 book Return to Earth, best known for its candid account of his battle with alcoholism and depression in the years immediately following the Apollo 11 flight, represents his growing up as a classic case of a boy desperately seeking the elusive love and approval of a strong father.
Settling his family in Montclair, Gene Aldrin became an executive with Standard Oil of New Jersey. He was rarely home. In fact, he became famous for being one of the country’s first executives to compile many tens of thousands of miles of business travel by airplane. He even made a few trips by airship, including one memorable crossing of the Atlantic in the famous German zeppelin Hindenburg. (According to Buzz, his father told friends after making the dirigible flight that it was neither safe nor practical.) In the early 1930s, Aldrin Sr. piloted a flight in a Standard Oil Lockheed Vega over the Alps from Germany to Italy; on board with him was his wife and a mechanic. During the flight of Italian general Italo Balbo into the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933, Gene handled the American logistics. For that service to General Balbo, the Mussolini government made Gene Aldrin a commendatore, or commander, in Italy’s National Order of Merit, the country’s highest honor. Leaving Standard Oil in 1938, he became an independent aviation consultant. Among his professional associations were Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, and Jimmy Doolittle.
With so much talk about aviation in the Aldrin home, Buzz naturally took an interest in flying, but not always to his father’s complete satisfaction. He took his first airplane ride when he was two when his father piloted a company Lockheed Vega to Florida. Buzz remembered for his 1973 book: “My father must have been distressed to see his only son throwing up for most of his first plane ride.” Along with Buzz on that ride was the family’s African-American housekeeper, Alice. According to Buzz, Alice was his “best friend.” The two of them shared the third floor of the Aldrin house. “Her enthusiasm for my world made it grow, and more by demonstration than by words she taught me tolerance.”
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