First published 1974. Pan Books, paperback, 2019, pp 482, c.175,000 words.
Collins was the member of the crew of Apollo 11 that didn’t walk on the moon. This is his autobiography, written by himself.
Collins devotes only the first ten percent of the book to describing his life and career before joining NASA. He describes how he came from a distinguished U. S. Army family, but not wanting to be labelled with nepotism, joined the fledgling US Air Force. He worked his way rapidly up to becoming a test pilot – the elite. He describes what the job of a test pilot is and why it was that NASA recruited them to be their astronauts, almost exclusively in those early days of space flight. The 99% of the work of an astronaut, and what we, the public, didn’t see, was helping develop an experimental spacecraft. Very, very little of an astronaut’s time was spent in space. Most of them only went on a single flight. For each of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins Apollo 11 was their second and last flight. Only three NASA astronauts had four: the maximum up to the end of the Skylab programme as listed in this book.
Collins has an engaging and unadorned writing style which gives the impression of a solid and determined man. He fully conveys the frustrations and tensions of the job, the competition and camaraderie amongst his colleagues; all manoeuvring for a place on a launch, all aware of the apparently arbitrary nature of the selection procedure that could be disrupted only too easily by technical or personal mishaps. Apollo 10 might have landed. The mission was identical in all other respects to 11, although allegedly the lander wasn’t given sufficient fuel to ensure the crew didn’t override orders. If something had gone wrong with 8, 9, or 10, then 11 would have had to repeat that step and the crew of 12 would have been the first to land. Who can remember their names now? (Conrad, Gordon, Bean.)
Collins conveys the pressure on the astronauts’ wives who could also be instantly catapulted into the media spotlight by a mission. He also mentions that no black people were chosen, which he considers a pity, but when he was on a selection board, none were candidates. He was not so sorry that no women were chosen because of the confined space of the capsules meant that all bodily functions had to be performed only too closely and publicly in front of colleagues. He is a man of his time in that regard. In all other ways one might expect women to dominate astronaut selection because their smaller physical size, and therefor also lower food consumption, would result in less launch mass: a huge cost driver.
The pay was relatively modest and there were ups and downs with the job: NASA had a fleet of fighter jets (T-38) on hand so the astronauts could fly themselves around to publicity events and meetings with subcontractors and administrators who were spread across the country. Those publicity events weren’t usually fun.
This is a book for anyone interested in space and what it took to put a man on the moon, now over fifty years ago. It is very well written, bringing the people and times to life.
© William John Graham, May 2022