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Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

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Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#131

Post by dokem »

yarg wrote: post #126
dokem wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to imagine that bitter-sweetness he must've felt. At the same time, how could he ever complain. Maybe he took no issue, but I'm sure everyone in the program was hoping to be the first man.

I can't imagine that he took issue; these guys generally seemed to put the mission before the self.

They are also cut-throat competitive, ego maniacs. Just incredibly professional. I don't think you get to where those guys are without an incredibly appetite for success.

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#132

Post by mandevil »

vkou wrote: post #114
mandevil wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the lunar science was not just limited to sample return, and here the J missions (Apollo 15-17) with their SIM bay cameras produced much better image quality than even Lunar Orbiter for much of the Moon's surface (Lunar Orbiter 5, in the polar orbit, was able to map parts of the Moon that the J missions never saw.) Similarly, the rover's traveled farther than the Lunkhod's did, showing us a much greater ar…

Robotics has advanced a lot further from the 60s than the ability of people wearing space suits to manipulate instruments. In fact, the latter hasn't really advanced at all in those 60 years.

By the nature of the beast, a spacecraft with humans is going to have absolutely thunderous mass and energy budgets compared to robotic ones, so any instrument you can put on a robot you can put on a manned mission.

In a similar manner, I would expect any manned mission to Mars to employ a lot of robots: control is much easier when the human making the decisions is a few light seconds away versus 8 light minutes. And if you have the mass (and money) for a manned mission, you can tuck in a bunch of robots for very little extra. So a human mission will always be strictly greater than (in scientific return and cash budget) robot mission.

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#133

Post by ahi »

sp3000 wrote: post #76
pornel wrote: post #40

I love the photo he took, where in the frame there was literally every human who was alive and has ever lived, except Michael Collins himself: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/a11_h_44...

“How isolated, how lonely those two space supermen appeared! But they had each other for companionship; and through television, they were held in the thoughts of viewing millions of men and women. To be really isolated, to fully experience loneliness, you must be alone. From Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s spectacular movements, my mind shifted to Collins’s lunar orbiting. Relatively inactive and unwatched, he had time for…

Lindbergh died in 1974. The man who first soloed across the Atlantic wrote the forward for the man who first soloed around the moon. Huh.

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#135

Post by [deleted] »

mulmen wrote: post #106
pdonis wrote: post #104

Earlier 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. 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.

[deleted]

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#136

Post by XorNot »

toyg wrote: post #107
slg wrote: post #29

Collins' 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 l…

This might be one of the best villain "ticks" I've ever heard of.

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#137

Post by mandevil »

ahi wrote: post #133
sp3000 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“How isolated, how lonely those two space supermen appeared! But they had each other for companionship; and through television, they were held in the thoughts of viewing millions of men and women. To be really isolated, to fully experience loneliness, you must be alone. From Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s spectacular movements, my mind shifted to Collins’s lunar orbiting. Relatively inactive and unwatched, he had time for…

Lindbergh died in 1974. The man who first soloed across the Atlantic wrote the forward for the man who first soloed around the moon. Huh.

A child born on December 17th, 1903- the day the Wright's flew a plane just under a quarter mile at Kittyhawk- would have turned 65 the day before Apollo 8 took off to take the first humans to Lunar orbit.

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#138

Post by anyfoo »

yarg wrote: post #121

I feel bad for Collins, at best he got the "also participated" award in the public mindshare - and this despite that fact he was left more alone than any man in history, locked about the dark side of the moon, wondering if he was going home alone.

Yeah, I don't know... at the same time he was well in the "first crew on the moon" club, without just as much of the constant, unwavering, overwhelming attention that Neil Armstrong must have gotten.

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#139

Post by daveslash »

I pondered to my wife "I wonder if we'll return to the moon before all those who have been have passed away?" Phrased another way: "Will there ever be a day (since the first landing) on which no living human has left the Earth?"

Here's the list. In this context, I use "leave the Earth" mean to mean having left the planet's gravity well, not the atmosphere only. And asterisk implies walked on the moon. The number in brackets is the Apollo Mission no.

  Frank Borman [8] 
  Jim Lovell [8,13]
  Bill Anders [8]
  Tom Stafford [10]
  Fred Haise [13]
  Buzz Aldrin* [11]
  David Scott*  [15]
  Charlie Duke* [16]
  Ken Mattingly [16]
  Harrison Schmitt* [17]

Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died

#140

Post by mandevil »

publicola1990 wrote: post #50
unchocked wrote: post #4

Clear skies and tailwinds. Can't get back to the Moon fast enough, while we still have living continuity to Apollo. Can't believe how low the low in our space program has been.

Last years Chang'e 5 mission was essentially a robotic Apollo mission. This decade does look to be promising for Lunar exploration.

Chang'e 5 was more like a modern day Luna 16 than an Apollo mission.
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