Michael Collins > Quotes

“I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.”
― Michael Collins

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed. The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.”
― Michael Collins

“Q: What were you thinking when your colleagues were out there making cosmic history?
A: I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender.”
― Michael Collins

“I am also planning to leave a lot of things undone. Part of life's mystery depends on future possibilities, and mystery is an elusive quality which evaporates when sampled frequently, to be followed by boredom. For example, catching various types of fish is on my list of good things to do, but I would be reluctant to rush into it, even if i had the time. I want no part of destroying fishing as a mysterious sport.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“We are off! And do we know it, not just because the world is yelling "Lift-off" in our ears, but because the seats of our pants tell us so! Trust your instruments, not your body, the modern pilot is always told, but this beast is best felt. Shake, rattle and roll!”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“A classic case of poor cockpit design is the ejection procedure which used to be in one Air Force trainer. It was a placard listing half a dozen important steps, printed boldly on the canopy rail where the pilot couldn’t miss seeing it. The only flaw was that step 1 was “jettison the canopy.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much a part of what's taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“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.”
― michael collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“When it is dark enough, men see the stars.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect fifty-six hundred defects…”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Finally, I must say that below the threshold of fear for life and limb there lurks a similar emotion, perhaps not fear but at least apprehension, a worry, not that you are going to be killed, but that you will be terribly embarrassed.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Then it’s time to don a triangular yellow plastic urine bag by inserting the penis into a rubber receiver built into one corner of it. There are three sizes of receivers (small, medium, large), which are always referred to in more heroic terms: extra large, immense, and unbelievable. One selects based on bitter experience in ground tests, where a poor fit in the feet-above-head Gemini seating arrangement means urine trickling up the spine and pooling in the small of the back. “Wetbacks,” the suit technicians call these neophyte astronauts, with displeasure.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“At any rate, it was clear that our backup crew would not fly Gemini 10. So when I heard from John Young (he and Gus Grissom had just come off the Gemini 6 backup crew) that he and I were to fly 10, I was overjoyed. I would miss Ed, but I liked John. And besides, I would have flown by myself or with a kangaroo, I just wanted to fly. All that stuff about crew psychological compatibility is crap. Almost anyone can put up with almost anyone else for a clearly defined period of time in pursuit of a mutual objective important to each.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“On the return trip, the atmospheric “re-entry corridor,” or zone of survivability, or whatever you wanted to call it, was only forty miles thick, and hitting a forty-mile target from 230,000 miles is like trying to split a human hair with a razor blade thrown from a distance of twenty feet.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“As we got busier and busier, we paid less and less attention to the mail, and I have since met more than one friend who clearly felt that I had gotten so big for my britches that I had chosen to ignore his heartfelt message. Most of the messages were pretty straightforward, but there were a few weirdos in the bunch. One poor man, obviously deranged, wrote from Israel, enclosing reams of data on the gigantic ants that infested the moon. It would be disaster, he pointed out, for the LM to come down on or near one of these anthills, and he would be happy to provide us with his detailed maps showing the location of each hill—for a price, of course.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Even more basic, any EVA puts man just one thin, glued-together, rubber membrane away from near-instant death.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“As the four of us ascend, I feel that more than the elevator door has clanged shut behind me. I recall that there are one million visitors here to watch the launch, but I feel closer to the moon than to them. This elevator ride, this first vertical nudge, has marked the beginning of Apollo 11, for we cannot touch the Earth any longer.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“My computer had been equipped with a slightly different program which M.I.T. called Colossus IIA; it was aptly named. I felt flea-sized in its presence, and punched the computer keys with a good deal of reverence, as I availed myself of the services of this giant. That is, until it and I started to disagree and it refused to give me the answers I sought. Then I lost my temper. Flash an “operator error” light at me, will you, you stupid goddamned computer, and I would sputter and stammer until the soothing voice of Tom Wilson14 or one of the other instructors came over the earphones and unctuously explained how I had offended their precocious brat.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“9. Pilots worry about how their call signs will sound over the radio, which does not transmit either the very high or the very low frequencies in the human voice. This slight alteration sometimes renders a familiar sound unrecognizable. I remember well one fighter group call sign, “Flit Gun,” which was always misunderstood by ground controllers when transmitted by the squeaky voice of our excitable group commander. “Roger, Six Gun,” they would say, and he would tartly reply, “No, it’s Flit Gun.” “Roger, Six Gun.” That would destroy him. “No, goddamn it, Flit Gun! Flit! Flit!” It was a pleasure to fly in his formation and share these military moments.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“The earth from orbit is a delight—alive, inviting, enchanting—offering visual variety and an emotional feeling of belonging “down there.” Not so with this withered, sun-seared peach pit out my window. There is no comfort to it; it is too stark and barren; its invitation is monotonous and meant for geologists only. Look at this crater, look at that one, are they the result of impacts, or volcanism, or a mixture of both?”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“But it seems to me you had an experience of in some ways greater profundity—the hours you spent orbiting the moon alone, and with more time for contemplation. What a fantastic experience it must have been—alone looking down on another celestial body, like a god of space! There is a quality of aloneness that those who have not experienced it cannot know—to be alone and then to return to one’s fellow men once more. You have experienced an aloneness unknown to man before. I believe you will find that it lets you think and sense with greater clarity. Sometime in the future, I would like to listen to your own conclusions in this respect.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Deke proposed a system which had been used in previous selections, and with minor modifications we agreed. It was a thirty-point system divided equally into three parts: academics, pilot performance, character and motivation. “Academics” was really a misnomer, as an examination of its components will reveal: IQ score—one point; academic degrees, honors, and other credentials—four points; results of NASA-administered aptitude tests—three points; and results of a technical interview—two points. Pilot performance broke down into: examination of flying records (total time, type of airplane, etc.)—three points; flying rating by test pilot school or other supervisors—one point; and results of technical interview—six points. Character and motivation was not subdivided, but the entire ten-point package was examined in the interview, and the victim’s personality was an important part of it. Hence, of the thirty points (the maximum a candidate could earn), eighteen could be awarded during the all-important interview. My recollection is that we spent an hour per man, using roughly forty-five minutes to quiz him and fifteen in a postmortem. We sat all day long in a stuffy room in the Rice Hotel, interviewing from early morning to early evening, for one solid week.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon. I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully—not as fear or loneliness—but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys

“More recent Gemini graduates, Stafford and I were the newcomers, but Tom seemed to be a swifter study than I. He had been number one in his class in electrical engineering at the Naval Academy, and he sopped up wiring diagrams with the same ease with which some teenage girls memorize the words of popular songs.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“It was impressive, I thought, a stroke of genius to relate their primordial setting to the origin of the earth, and to couch it in the beautiful seventeenth-century prose poetry of King James I’s scholars.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“possibly dangerous”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“Our trip down into the canyon took nearly the whole day, so we spent the night at a charming inn at the bottom and the next morning those of us who wanted to rented burros for an expedited ascent. I chose to ride, but picked an animal which stopped walking whenever I stopped kicking, so I got as much exercise as if I had been afoot. I also had plenty of time to contemplate the rapid pace at which I was speeding toward the moon. From supersonic jets at Edwards I had progressed all the way to kicking a burro up out of the Grand Canyon.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“There is money hanging around, but it is tainted PR money, trading great piles of greenbacks for tiny bits of soul in an undetermined but unsatisfactory ratio. For example, I have been offered $50,000 to do beer commercials, and I love beer, but somehow it seems a grubby thing to do.”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

“If we want to change course, it’s as simple as ABC. We just get Roger Chaffee’s tracking network to send up a state vector and a couple of other things to Dave Scott’s computer, which feeds pointing commands through Dick Gordon’s instrument panel to Donn Eisele’s controls, which cause Walt Cunningham’s electricity to power Gene Cernan’s engines, which fire, to get us out of Bill Anders’s radiation zone into the position called for by Buzz Aldrin’s flight plan. The rest of you guys must be loafing!”
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey