Michael Collins (October 31, 1930 – April 28, 2021) was an American astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 command module Columbia around the Moon in 1969 while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, made the first crewed landing on the surface. He was also a test pilot and major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

Born in Rome, where his father was serving as the U.S. military attaché, Collins graduated in the Class of 1952 from the United States Military Academy. He followed his father, brother, uncle, and cousin into the military. He joined the United States Air Force, and flew F-86 Sabre fighters at Chambley-Bussières Air Base, France. He was accepted into the U.S. Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1960, also graduating from the Aerospace Research Pilot School (Class III).

Selected as part of NASA's third group of 14 astronauts in 1963, Collins flew in space twice. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 10 in 1966, in which he and Command Pilot John Young performed orbital rendezvous with two spacecraft and undertook two extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks). On the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, he became one of 24 Apollo astronauts to reach the Moon, which he orbited thirty times. He was the fourth person (and third American) to perform a spacewalk, the first person to have performed more than one spacewalk, and, after Young, who flew the command module on Apollo 10, the second person to orbit the Moon alone.

After retiring from NASA in 1970, Collins took a job in the Department of State as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. A year later, he became the director of the National Air and Space Museum, and held this position until 1978, when he stepped down to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1980, he took a job as vice president of LTV Aerospace. He resigned in 1985 to start his own consulting firm. Along with his Apollo 11 crewmates, Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011.

Early life

Michael Collins was born on October 31, 1930, in Rome, Kingdom of Italy. He was the second son of James Lawton Collins, a career U.S. Army officer, who was the U.S. military attaché there from 1928 to 1932, and Virginia C. Collins ( Stewart). Collins had an older brother, James Lawton Collins Jr. and two older sisters, Virginia and Agnes. Collins' mother was of British descent, and his father's family hailed from Ireland.

For the first 17 years of his life, Collins lived in many places as the Army posted his father to different locations: Rome; Oklahoma; Governors Island, New York; Fort Hoyle (near Baltimore, Maryland); Fort Hayes (near Columbus, Ohio); Puerto Rico; San Antonio, Texas; and Alexandria, Virginia. During his boyhood, Collins was an altar boy who served at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, but in his own words, he was "probably the only astronaut who had never been a Boy Scout". He took his first plane ride in Puerto Rico aboard a Grumman Widgeon; the pilot allowed him to fly it for a portion of the flight. He wanted to fly again, but since World War II started soon after, he was unable. He studied for two years in the Academia del Perpetuo Socorro in San Juan, Puerto Rico.San Juan's Young King Who Climbed to the Moon. 1969 Congressional Record, Vol. 115, Pages H25639-H25640 (September 16, 1969). Retrieved November 26, 2015. After the United States entered World War II, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Collins attended St. Albans School and graduated in 1948. His mother wanted him to enter the diplomatic service, but he decided to follow his father, two uncles, brother, and cousin into the armed services. He received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, from which his father and his older brother had graduated in 1907 and 1939 respectively. He graduated on June 3, 1952, with a Bachelor of Science degree in military science, finishing 185th of 527 cadets in the class, which included future fellow astronaut Ed White.

Collins' decision to join the United States Air Force (USAF) was motivated by both the wonder of what the next fifty years might bring in aeronautics, and to avoid accusations of nepotism had he joined the Army — where his brother was already a colonel, his father had reached the rank of major general and his uncle, General J. Lawton Collins (1896–1987), was the Chief of Staff of the United States Army. The Air Force Academy, still under construction, would not graduate its first class for several years. In the interim, graduates of the Military Academy were eligible for Air Force commissions. Promotion was slower in the Air Force than in the Army, due to the large number of young officers who had been commissioned and promoted during World War II.

Military service

Fighter pilot

Collins began basic flight training in the T-6 Texan at Columbus Air Force Base in Columbus, Mississippi, in August 1952, then moved on to San Marcos Air Force Base in Texas to learn instrument and formation flying, and finally to James Connally Air Force Base in Waco, Texas, for training in jet aircraft. Flying came easily to him, and unlike many of his colleagues, he had little fear of failure. He was awarded his wings upon completion of the course at Waco, and in September 1953, he was chosen for advanced day-fighter training at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, flying F-86 Sabres. The training was dangerous; eleven people were killed in accidents during the 22 weeks he was there.

This was followed by an assignment in January 1954 to the 21st Fighter-Bomber Wing at George Air Force Base, California, where he learned ground attack and nuclear weapons delivery techniques in the F-86. He moved with the 21st to Chambley-Bussières Air Base, France, in December 1954. He won first prize in a 1956 gunnery competition. During a NATO exercise that year, he was forced to eject from an F-86, near Chaumont-Semoutiers AB, after a fire started aft of the cockpit.

Collins met his future wife, Patricia Mary Finnegan from Boston, Massachusetts, in an officers' mess. A graduate of Emmanuel College, where she majored in English, she was a social worker, dealing mainly with single mothers. To see more of the world, she was working for the Air Force service club. After getting engaged, they had to overcome a difference in religion. Collins was raised nominally Episcopalian, while Finnegan came from a staunchly Roman Catholic family. Collins converted to Catholicism before their marriage. After seeking permission to marry from Finnegan's father, and delaying their wedding when Collins was redeployed to West Germany during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, they married in 1957. They had a daughter, actress Kate Collins, in 1959, a second daughter, Ann, in 1961 and a son, Michael, in 1963.

After Collins returned to the United States in late 1957, he attended an aircraft maintenance officer course at Chanute Air Force Base, Illinois. He would later describe this school as "dismal" in his autobiography; he found the classwork boring, flying time scarce, and the equipment outdated. Upon completing the course, he commanded a Mobile Training Detachment (MTD) and traveled to air bases around the world. The detachment trained mechanics on the servicing of new aircraft, and pilots how to fly them. He later became the first commander of a Field Training Detachment (FTD 523) back at Nellis AFB, which was a similar kind of unit, except that the students traveled to him.

Test pilot

Collins' MTD posting allowed him to accumulate over 1,500 flying hours, the minimum required for admission to the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California. His application was successful, and on August 29, 1960, he became a member of Class 60C, which included Frank Borman, Jim Irwin and Tom Stafford, who later became astronauts. Military test pilot instruction started with the North American T-28 Trojan, and proceeded through the high performance F-86 Sabre, B-57 Canberra, T-33 Shooting Star, and the F-104 Starfighter. Collins was a heavy smoker, but quit in 1962 after suffering a particularly bad hangover. The next day, he spent what he described as the worst four hours of his life in the co-pilot's seat of a B-52 Stratofortress while going through the initial stages of nicotine withdrawal.

The inspiration for Collins in his decision to become a NASA astronaut was the Mercury Atlas 6 flight of John Glenn on February 20, 1962, and the thought of being able to circle the Earth in 90 minutes. Collins applied for the second group of astronauts that year. To raise the numbers of Air Force pilots selected, the Air Force sent their best applicants to a "charm school". Medical and psychiatric examinations at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, and interviews at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston followed. In mid-September, he found out he had not been accepted. It was a blow even though he did not expect to be selected. Collins rated the second group of nine as better than the Mercury Seven who preceded them, or the five groups that followed, including his own.

That year the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School became the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS), as the Air Force tried to enter into space research through the X-15 and X-20 programs. Collins applied for a new postgraduate course offered into the basics of spaceflight. He was accepted into the third class on October 22, 1962. Other students in his eleven-member class included three future astronauts: Charles Bassett, Edward Givens and Joe Engle. Along with classwork, they also flew up to about in F-104 Starfighters. As they passed through the top of their arc, they would experience a brief period of weightlessness. On finishing this course he returned to fighter operations in May 1963.

At the start of June, NASA once again called for astronaut applications. Collins went through the same process as with his first application, though he did not take the psychiatric evaluation. He was at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, on October 14 when Deke Slayton, the Chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA, called and asked if he was still interested in becoming an astronaut. Charles Bassett was also accepted. By this time Collins had flown over 3,000 hours, of which 2,700 were in jet aircraft.

Space program

Compared with the first two groups of astronauts, the third group of fourteen astronauts, which included Collins, was younger, with an average age of 31—the first two groups had an average age of 34.5 and 32.5 at their time of selection—and was better educated, with an average of 5.6 years of tertiary education; but they had fewer flying hours—2,300 on average compared with 3,500 and 2,800 for the first two groups, and only eight of the fourteen were test pilots. Of the thirty astronauts selected in the first three groups, only Collins and his third group colleague William Anders were born outside the United States, and Collins was the only one with an older brother; all the rest were the eldest or only sons in their families. Training began with a 240-hour course on the basics of spaceflight. Fifty-eight hours of this was devoted to geology, something Collins did not readily understand and in which he never became very interested. At the end, Alan Shepard, the Chief of the Astronaut Office, asked the fourteen to rank their fellow astronauts in the order they would want to fly with them in space. Collins picked David Scott in the number one position.

Project Gemini

Crew assignments