In 1970 (shortly after my birth), my grandmother bought me my first Christmas ornament for the tree. It was a glass Michael Collins astronaut figure. Over the years, it has taken a couple tumbles, lost a leg and most of the helmet, but every year it goes up to the top of the tree in a prominent place. I was struck with a profound sense of sadness today when I heard of his passing mostly due to my connection to him via this simple ornament. He will continue on in that place of prominence and I hope to pass this on to my children and their children at some point.
Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
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Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#42Clear 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.
SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA instead.
I'd rather have them fail their first 9 attempts that each take a month before succeeding, than succeeding on the first attempt that takes a decade.
Failure during research & development isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA instead.
I love how whenever SpaceX fails to land a booster that I see headlines of "SpaceX blows up another rocket", even if it still delivered its payload to orbit. I do wonder, however, where NASA would be if they would have continued with the DC-X prototype instead of abandoning it when it had a landing leg failure causing it to topple over in an early test.
It's because of Elon's hubris and the ways that hubris is baked into the entire institutional culture. I think far fewer people would delight in their failures if they showed an ounce of humility from any of their mistakes. Instead, they continue to make wild eyed proclamations and promises of impossible goals, but it's Elon so people continue to believe him for some reason.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#44RIP Michael Collins.
Jethro Tull has a song about Michael Collins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU7BYLmAiV8 "For Michael Collins, Jeffery and Me"
I'm with you L.E.M
Though it's a shame that it had to be you
The mother ship
Is just a blip from your trip made for two
I'm with you boys
So please employ just a little extra care
It's on my mind
I'm left behind when I should have been there
Walking with youRe: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pictures of Pluto, a helicopter on Mars, I’m more inspired than ever by nasa
And I love them for it. But I want humans on the Moon again.
To be fair, the pure scientific impact of the robotic missions is probably much higher than human ones (besides advances in medical/bioscience). But, placing people on the moon probably brings more funding for NASA than robots.
Edit: Both are still extremely cool though
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#46Appropriately he has died just after a full moon.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#47Collins' 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…
I mean, a few guys stayed in orbit on subsequent lunar missions, but you're right, Collins was the first.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#48Collins' 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…
Collins also spent a lot of time outside of radio comms.
If something had gone wrong on the dark side of the moon, we might never have known what happened. We'd have had a perfectly cheerful conversation with the command module pilot, then a comms blackout, then nothing... With a lot of coordination, the lander crew could possibly have returned to the command module without Collins's support to find out what happened to him (and hopefully found a CM still in a condition to go home).
And for all that, he reported in his autobiography that it didn't bother him.
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA instead.
Occurrence of failures directly correlates to occurrence of growth and innovation. SpaceX is (a) innovating very fast, and therefore we see lots of failures, (b) embracing those failures as opportunities to grow, and (c) installing many sensors and collecting a lot of data to maximize the chance that they can learn a lot from whatever failures occur. Make no mistake, if a company or institution isn't trying a lot and…
Then why shouldn't we apply this same standard to government projects? Any time a government project doesn't go perfectly it's used an excuse to scrap the very concept of government since "they can't do anything right".
Re: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, has died
#50Clear 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.