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Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
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Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was no was way for him to return to solid Earth unless the lunar module came back. I'm not sure what you're basing that on. The Apollo 11 flight plan, available on the NASA website [1], shows LM jettison before TEI burn. That indicates that the LM was not needed for TEI. If for some reason the LM did not come back from the surface of the Moon, the CSM could still execute the TEI burn. [1] https://www.hq.nasa.…
The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before TEI. Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations or some other maneuvers. That it was jettisoned before the burn tells us nothing about the necessity of the module up to the moment it was jettisoned.
A necessary fuel transfer, at least, wouldn't make sense. If fuel was needed to come back, sending it down and back again would have just meant wasting more fuel for no benefit to lug it there and back again.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#103no one cares what nazis think about another nazi
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was no was way for him to return to solid Earth unless the lunar module came back. I'm not sure what you're basing that on. The Apollo 11 flight plan, available on the NASA website [1], shows LM jettison before TEI burn. That indicates that the LM was not needed for TEI. If for some reason the LM did not come back from the surface of the Moon, the CSM could still execute the TEI burn. [1] https://www.hq.nasa.…
The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before TEI. Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations or some other maneuvers. That it was jettisoned before the burn tells us nothing about the necessity of the module up to the moment it was jettisoned.
> The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before TEI.
The flight plan makes clear that this is not the case.
> Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations or some other maneuvers.
Even without reading the details of the flight plan, the LM was designed to carry just enough fuel to get down to the Moon's surface and back up again, with no extra fuel for other maneuvers; there wasn't any margin for any extra if the mission was to be doable at all. So it doesn't seem plausible that the CSM would have had to depend on getting some fuel transferred back from the LM in order to execute TEI.
As far as guidance calculations, that doesn't seem plausible either. The CSM, having been in a single stable orbit the whole time, would be expected to have much better guidance information than the LM, which had just executed a series of maneuvers, some of which were under manual control.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#105I've always thought the CSM commanders had the most incredible and challenging role of the three Apollo astronauts. They were undoubtedly the "most alone" humans ever — at least on a physical level. Every other hour they'd transit to the far side of the moon and would be 2200 miles (3600km) away from the nearest two humans and hundreds of thousands of miles/km away from everyone else who's ever lived. Not only that,…
What I find remarkable about that quote is that there were only three billion humans at the time. Apollo 11 wasn’t that long ago was it? And we’re already at a population more than twice that figure.
Before covid, worldometers was known for tracking population data!
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#table-histor...
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before TEI. Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations or some other maneuvers. That it was jettisoned before the burn tells us nothing about the necessity of the module up to the moment it was jettisoned.
> The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before TEI. The flight plan makes clear that this is not the case. > Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations or some other maneuvers. Even without reading the details of the flight plan, the LM was designed to carry just enough fuel to get down to the Moon's surface and back up again, with no ext…
Sure, that all makes sense, and we know how it worked and that the LM was not needed. I’m just saying that we can’t infer the LM was unneeded for TEI just because it was jettisoned.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#107Collins' role in Apollo 11 is often minimized in the public conciseness, but I find it particularly fascinating from a human perspective. In certain ways it seems even scarier than Armstrong's and Aldrin's jobs. They at least had more direct control over their success in landing on the moon. Collins was largely powerless to help if something went wrong. If that did happen, he would have been faced with the choice of…
> it seems even scarier than Armstrong's and Aldrin's jobs. [...] When he was on the far side of the moon he was truly alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human history.
This was used by Naoki Urasawa in his "20th Century Boys" manga series. The main villain, who has effectively isolated himself from his humanity, keeps repeating "I am Michael Collins", to describe his delusion of being at once the loneliest being ever and the one from which everyone else will eventually depend.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#108Collins' role in Apollo 11 is often minimized in the public conciseness, but I find it particularly fascinating from a human perspective. In certain ways it seems even scarier than Armstrong's and Aldrin's jobs. They at least had more direct control over their success in landing on the moon. Collins was largely powerless to help if something went wrong. If that did happen, he would have been faced with the choice of…
All of humanity in one picture except for Michael Collins:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/63ztoy/all_of_hu...
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
To compare the scientific return of robots and people, we can compare the results of the only space rock both have visited: the Moon. The six manned Apollo missions brought back much much much more scientific return than all of the contemporary robotic missions. Apollo brought back 382 kg of moon rocks. Three Soviet probes (first one, Luna 16, between Apollo 12 and 14) brought back a total of 326g. While it's a bit f…
Bear in mind that the Luna missions were done with 1960s Soviet robotics technology... And were only a side-show to their goal of a manned landing, which was hamstrung by repeated launcher problems. (And as soon as they lost the moon race, interest in this immediately dried up on the Soviet side - the sample return in the 70s was an afterthought.) If your goal is to plant a flag and ship back ~400 Kg of moon rocks, y…
Coincidentally last night I re-watched one of my favorite episodes of "From the Earth to the Moon," "Galileo was Right," which focuses on the Apollo 15 crews getting field training in geology. Their instructor (along with backup LM pilot Jack Schmitt, a geologist, who then flew on Apollo 17) emphasized identifying and collecting the "right" rocks, not just "any" rocks, which led to some of the more interesting samples, including the "Genesis Rock."
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#110I cried today. I don't cry when strangers die, famous strangers particularly. But I cried today when I heard he had passed. He was a profound man who deserves a profound eulogy. That's beyond my capabilities, but I'd like to give it a good shake anyway.
I never had the good fortune of crossing paths with him except for the one time he liked one of my tweets (I joked that I'd been touched by celebrity - he intensely disliked celebrities). But I want to take a moment to describe how much Michael Collins meant to me.
His book, Carrying The Fire, https://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-Astronauts-Michael-Coll... is one of the reasons why I've decided to go into aerospace and take my shot at becoming an astronaut as an adult. He wrote parts of this book in orbit around the moon, and the rest when he came back to Earth. It is hard to describe the degree of tender self awareness that he possessed and the insight with which he wrote.
His book is one of the few books where the forwards are just as important as the book itself. Here's one he recently wrote,
> Could I be one of twelve of eighteen thousand? No way in hell.
It is rare for someone to acknowledge the locus at which the sum of their perspiration and preparation collided with the vagaries of fate. It is rarer still for them to say that had they been born later, or had the circumstances been any different, they might not have been the same. And it is far rarer for someone to talk about the mistakes of youth with this level of humor and care,
> Never mind the excuses, I was a mediocre student, more interested in athletics than academics. I was captain of the wrestling team, but even that was a bit tainted, as I was also a secret smoker. Stupid.
He had, as he admits in the forward, ADHD that went undiagnosed at the time. His teachers thought he was lazy, and he struggled in school. His grades were subpar, and at some point he woke up and he was thirty, writing,
> How had I managed to take so long to get so little done — no advanced degree, a piddling two thousand hours’ flying time, thirty years old, and nothing special in my record to offset these deficiencies?
A lot of books by people who have experienced what it is like to have history's eye upon them don't go into such details. And if they do, they tend to be written by others or they suffer from terminal self-aggrandizement. Collins' account doesn't suffer from this. It feels so raw and real, an inner exploration just as much an outer one.
It's as if we sent on Apollo 11 not just a preternaturally calm man with oodles of the Right Stuff (Neil Armstrong) and an orbital mechanics expert (Buzz Aldrin), but also a self-aware artist who recorded some of the most beautiful images of the trip and tried to capture the beauty of what he saw in front of him in verse. A man who can recite passages from Paradise Lost from heart and talks about the importance of bringing art and joy into the sciences. https://twitter.com/AstroMCollins/status/1313882376225734656
NASA chose well.
Here's one final quote from Carrying The Fire,
> Of course, Apollo was the god who carried the fiery sun across the sky in a chariot. But beyond that, how would you carry fire? Carefully, that's how, with lots of planning and at considerable risk. It is a delicate cargo, as valuable as moon rocks, and the carrier must always be on his toes lest it spill.
> I carried the fire for six years, and now I would like to tell you about it, simply and directly as a test pilot must, for the trip deserves the telling.
I lied. Here's another Michael Collins-ism,
> Farmers speak to farmers, students to students, business leaders to other business leaders, but this intramural talk serves mainly to mirror one's beliefs, to reinforce existing prejudices, to lock out opposing views
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I'm holding a quasi-vigil for him on the aerospace club Small Steps & Giant Leaps in ClubHouse by reading Carrying the Fire personally or via the audiobook. You are welcome to join us and read a passage, a chapter, or whatever suits your fancy.
Here's the link, just come in the room and raise your hand, we'll pull you up :)
https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/PrDlo22D
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Here's an excellent interview of him from 2019 talking about SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, and Mars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtIO06N3sw