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 After this basic training, the third group was assigned specializations. Collins received his first choice: pressure suits and
extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks). His job was to monitor development and act as a liaison between the Astronaut Office and contractors. He was disturbed by the secretive planning of Ed White's EVA on
Gemini 4, because he was not involved despite being the person with the greatest knowledge of the subject. (left) and a model of their
Gemini spacecraft and
Titan II booster In late June 1965, Collins received his first crew assignment: the backup pilot for
Gemini 7, with his
West Point classmate Ed White named as the backup mission commander. Collins was the first of the fourteen to receive a crew assignment, but the first to fly was Scott on
Gemini 8, and
Charles Bassett was assigned to
Gemini 9. Under the system of crew rotation established by Slayton, being on the backup crew of Gemini7 set Collins up to pilot
Gemini 10. Gemini7 was commanded by Borman, whom Collins knew well from their days at Edwards, with
Jim Lovell as the pilot. Collins made a point of providing a daily briefing to their wives, Susan Borman and Marilyn Lovell, on the progress of the two-week Gemini7 mission. After the successful completion of Gemini7 on January 24, 1966, Collins was assigned to the prime crew of Gemini 10, but with
John Young as mission commander, as White moved on to the
Apollo program. Jim Lovell and
Buzz Aldrin were designated as the backup commander and pilot respectively. The arrangements were disturbed on February 28 by the deaths of the Gemini9 crew,
Charles Bassett and
Elliot See, in the
1966 NASA T-38 crash. They were replaced on Gemini9 by their backups, Stafford and
Gene Cernan. Cernan was the second of the fourteen to fly in space. Lovell and Aldrin became their backups, and
Alan Bean and
C.C. Williams took their place as the Gemini 10 backup crew. Collins would be the seventeenth American, and third member of his group, to fly in space. Training for Gemini 10 was interrupted in March when Slayton diverted Young, Collins and Williams to represent their respective services on a panel to select
another group of astronauts, along with himself, Shepard, spacecraft designer
Max Faget, and astronaut training officer
Warren J. North. Young protested the loss of a week's training to no avail. Applying strict criteria for age, flying experience and education reduced the number of applicants to 35. The panel interviewed each for an hour, and rated nineteen as qualified. Collins was surprised when Slayton elected to take them all. Slayton later admitted that he too had doubts; he already had enough astronauts for
Project Apollo as far as the first Moon landing, but post-Apollo plans were for up to 30 missions. Such a large intake therefore seemed prudent. Ten of the nineteen had test pilot experience, and seven were graduates of the ARPS.
Gemini 10 (left) and Michael Collins aboard the recovery ship Fifteen scientific experiments were carried on
Gemini 10—more than any other Gemini mission except the two-week-long Gemini 7. After Gemini 9's EVA ran into problems, the remaining Gemini objectives had to be completed on the last three flights. While the overall number of objectives increased, the difficulty of Collins' EVA was scaled significantly back. There was no backpack or astronaut maneuvering unit (AMU), as there had been on Gemini 8. Their three-day mission called for them to rendezvous with two
Agena Target Vehicles, undertake two EVAs, and perform 15 different experiments. The training went smoothly, as the crew learned the intricacies of
orbital rendezvous, controlling the Agena and, for Collins, the EVA. For what was to be the fourth ever EVA, underwater training was not performed, mostly because Collins did not have the time. To train to use the nitrogen gun he would use for propulsion, a smooth metal surface about the size of a boxing ring was set up. He would stand on a circular pad that used gas jets to raise itself off the surface. Using the nitrogen gun he would practice propelling himself across the "slippery table". Gemini 10 lifted off from
Launch Complex 19 at
Cape Canaveral at 17:20 local time on July 18, 1966. Upon reaching orbit, it was about behind the Agena target vehicle, which had been launched 100 minutes earlier. A rendezvous was achieved on Gemini 10's fourth orbit at 10:43, followed by docking at 11:13. The mission plan called for multiple dockings with the Agena target, but an error by Collins in using the
sextant caused them to burn valuable propellant, resulting in Mission Control calling off this objective to conserve propellant. Once docked, the Agena 10 propulsion system was activated to boost the astronauts to a new altitude record, above the Earth, breaking the previous record of set by
Voskhod 2. photographed near the
Gemini 10 spacecraft|alt=Rocket floating above Earth A second burn of the Agena 10 engine at 03:58 on July 19 put them into the same orbit as Agena8, which had been launched for the Gemini8 mission on March 16. For his first EVA Collins did not leave the Gemini capsule, but stood up through the hatch with an ultraviolet camera. The docking practice and the landmark measurement experiment were cancelled in order to conserve propellant, and the micrometeorite collector was lost when it drifted out of the spacecraft. The surgery was performed at
Wilford Hall Hospital at
Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. The planned recuperation time was three to six months. Collins spent three months in a neck brace. As a result, he was removed from the prime crew of
Apollo 9 and his backup, Jim Lovell, replaced him as CMP. When the
Apollo 8 mission was changed from a CSM/LM mission in high
Earth orbit to a CSM-only flight around the Moon, both prime and backup crews for Apollo8 and9 swapped places.
Apollo 8 Having trained for the flight, Collins was made a
capsule communicator (CAPCOM), an astronaut stationed at
Mission Control responsible for communicating directly with the crew during a mission. As part of the Green Team, he covered the launch phase up to
translunar injection, the rocket burn that sent Apollo8 to the Moon. The successful completion of the first crewed circumlunar flight was followed by the announcement of the Apollo 11 crew of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. At that time, in January 1969, it was uncertain this would be the lunar landing mission; this depended on the success of Apollo9 and
Apollo 10 testing the LM.
Apollo 11 : from left to right,
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and
Buzz Aldrin.|left As CMP, Collins' training was completely different from the LM and lunar EVA, and was sometimes done without Armstrong or Aldrin being present. Along with simulators, there were measurements for pressure suits, centrifuge training to simulate the reentry, and practicing docking with a huge rig at
NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia. Since he would be the active participant in the rendezvous with the LM, Collins compiled a book of 18 different rendezvous schemes for various scenarios including ones where the LM did not land, or it launched too early or too late. This book ran for 117 pages. The
mission patch of Apollo 11 was the creation of Collins. Jim Lovell, the backup commander, mentioned the idea of eagles, a symbol of the United States. Collins liked the idea and found a painting by artist
Walter A. Weber in a
National Geographic Society book,
Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America, traced it and added the lunar surface below and Earth in the background. The idea of an olive branch, a symbol of peace, came from a computer expert at the simulators. The call sign
Columbia for the CSM came from
Julian Scheer, the NASA Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs. He mentioned the idea to Collins in a conversation and Collins could not think of anything better. During the training for Apollo 11, Slayton offered to get Collins back into the crew sequence after the flight. Collins would most likely have been the backup commander of
Apollo 14, followed by commander of
Apollo 17, but he told Slayton he did not want to travel to space again if Apollo 11 was successful. The difficult schedule of an astronaut strained his family life. He wanted to help achieve John F. Kennedy's goal of landing on the Moon within the decade and had no interest in further exploration of the Moon once the goal was achieved. The assignment was given to Cernan. An estimated one million spectators watched the launch of Apollo 11 from the highways and beaches in the vicinity of the launch site. The launch was televised live in 33 countries, with an estimated 25 million viewers in the United States alone. Millions more listened to radio broadcasts. Propelled by a giant
Saturn V rocket, Apollo 11 lifted off from
Launch Complex 39A at the
Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, at 13:32
UTC (09:32
EDT), and entered Earth orbit twelve minutes later. After one and a half orbits, the
S-IVB third-stage engine pushed the spacecraft onto its trajectory toward the Moon. About 30 minutes later, Collins performed the
transposition, docking, and extraction maneuver. This involved separating
Columbia from the spent S-IVB stage, turning around, and docking with the
Lunar Module Eagle. After it was extracted, the combined spacecraft headed for the Moon, while the rocket stage flew on a trajectory past it. On July 19 at 17:21:50 UTC, Apollo 11 passed behind the Moon and fired its service propulsion engine to enter
lunar orbit. In the thirty orbits that followed, the crew saw passing views of their landing site in the southern
Sea of Tranquillity about southwest of the crater
Sabine D. At 12:52:00 UTC on July 20, Aldrin and Armstrong entered
Eagle and began the final preparations for lunar descent. At 17:44:00
Eagle separated from
Columbia. Collins, alone aboard
Columbia, inspected
Eagle as it rotated before him to ensure the craft was not damaged and that the landing gear had correctly deployed before heading for the surface. During his day flying solo around the Moon, Collins never felt lonely. Although Mission Control speculated in that day's
log that "not since
Adam has any human known such solitude", Collins felt very much a part of the mission. In his autobiography he wrote "this venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two". In the 48 minutes of each orbit when he was out of radio contact with the Earth while
Columbia passed round the far side of the Moon, the feeling he reported was not fear or loneliness, but rather "awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation". One of Collins' first tasks was to identify the lunar module on the ground. To give Collins an idea where to look, Mission Control radioed that they believed the lunar module landed about four miles off target. Each time he passed over the suspected landing site, he tried in vain to find the lunar module. On his first two orbits on the far side of the Moon, Collins performed maintenance activities such as dumping excess water produced by the
fuel cells and preparing the cabin for Armstrong and Aldrin to return.
Columbia orbited the Moon thirty times. Just before he reached the far side on the third orbit, Mission Control informed Collins there was a problem with the temperature of the coolant. If it became too cold, parts of
Columbia might freeze. Mission Control advised him to assume manual control and implement Environmental Control System Malfunction Procedure 17. Instead, Collins flicked the switch on the offending system from automatic to manual and back to automatic again, and carried on with normal housekeeping chores, while keeping an eye on the temperature. When
Columbia came back around to the near side of the Moon again, he was able to report that the problem had been resolved. For the next couple of orbits, he described his time on the far side of the Moon as "relaxing". After Aldrin and Armstrong completed their EVA, Collins slept so he could be rested for the rendezvous. While the flight plan called for
Eagle to meet up with
Columbia, Collins was prepared for certain contingencies in which he would fly
Columbia down to meet
Eagle. After spending so much time with the CSM, he felt compelled to leave his mark on it, so during the second night following their return from the Moon, he went to the lower equipment bay of the CM and wrote: :"Spacecraft 107 – alias Apollo 11 – alias
Columbia. The best ship to come down the line. God Bless Her. Michael Collins, CMP" for detailed examination In a July 2009 interview with
The Guardian, Collins said that he was very worried about Armstrong and Aldrin's safety. He was also concerned in the event of their deaths on the Moon, he would be forced to return to Earth alone and, as the mission's sole survivor, be regarded as "a marked man for life". At 17:54 UTC on July 21,
Eagle lifted off from the Moon to rejoin Collins aboard
Columbia in lunar orbit. After rendezvous with
Columbia, the ascent stage was jettisoned into lunar orbit, and
Columbia made its way back to Earth.
Columbia splashed down in the
Pacific Ocean east of
Wake Island at 16:50 UTC (05:50 local time) on July 24. The total mission duration was eight days, three hours, 18 minutes, and thirty-five seconds. Divers passed biological isolation garments (BIGs) to the astronauts, and assisted them into the life raft. Though the chance of bringing back
pathogens from the lunar surface was believed to be remote, it was still considered a possibility. The astronauts were winched on board the recovery helicopter, and flown to the aircraft carrier , where they spent the first part of the Earth-based portion of 21 days of quarantine (time in space was also counted), before moving on to Houston. On August 13, the three astronauts rode in parades in their honor in New York and Chicago, with about six million attendees. On the same evening in Los Angeles there was an official
state dinner to celebrate the flight, attended by members of Congress, 44 governors, the
Chief Justice of the United States, and ambassadors from 83 nations at the
Century Plaza Hotel. In September, the astronauts embarked on a 38-day world tour that brought them to 22 foreign countries and included visits with world leaders. ==Post-NASA activities==