To Absent Friends - Michael Collins

Michael Collins

1930 - 2021 

A belated and melancholy Happy Trails to astronaut Michael Collins who died last month at the age of 90.  As a member of the historic Apollo 11 crew, Collins flew the command module Columbia solo around the moon while crew mates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the lunar module Eagle  to the lunar surface and became the first humans to walk on the moon.  When Collins flew Columbia around the back side of the moon, he lost all contact with both Armstrong and Aldrin and with Mission Control on Earth.  The official mission log of Apollo 11 noted that "Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins."

Collins was a graduate of West Point, and like most of the early generations of American astronauts, he served as a test pilot in the US Air Force.  He was chosen to be a Project Gemini astronaut, and made his first trip into space aboard Gemini 10 along with John Young.  His mission aboard Apollo 11 was his second and last flight into outer space.

Space travel barely makes the television news anymore, but if you were alive in the Summer of 1969, you will never forget the excitement surrounding the truly heroic events that surrounded Apollo 11 and man's first landing upon the surface of the moon.

RIP Mike Collins.

The Crew of Apollo 11

Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin

Aldrin is the only one still with us

Documentary Film - "Apollo 11"

Think you know all about the July 1969 Apollo 11 space flight when men first landed upon and explored the surface of the moon? (No, not really.)  Saw it live when you were a kid back then? (I did.) Read all about over the past fifty years? (Some, but, no, not much.) Saw the movie "First Man" last year?  (Well, yeah, I did.)

Regardless of how you answer those questions, you haven't seen anything yet until and unless you see the new documentary, "Apollo 11", from CNN Films.  It is complied from thousands of hours of film that was taken by NASA to document the Apollo 11 mission, and when you watch this, you will see it from points of view that you have never seen, or can probably even imagine.  I'll give you just two examples:

• The cameras in place at the foot of the rocket as the spacecraft is launched from the Cape Kennedy launch pad.
• The film from Columbia as the Eagle comes into view, approaches, and then docks with the the command module upon its return from the surface of the moon.

There is no narrator in this film.  No current interviews with participants looking back on the event.  Just films taken as the events were happening, from the transport of the rocket ship to the pad at Cape Kennedy to  Eagle's landing at Tranquility Base to Armstrong and Aldrin frolicking on the lunar surface to the splashdown of the ship in the Pacific.  

Seeing this movie from the perspective of fifty years after the fact makes you still marvel and wonder about the total magnitude of the entire undertaking.  "Apollo 11" is an engrossing and amazing look at perhaps the most significant scientific and technological event in all of history.  Awesome in the truest meaning of the word.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins 

each turned 39 years of age in 1969

That command module was 320 feet 

off the ground when on the launch pad