Michael Collins (Irish leader)

Michael Collins was born on October 31, 1930, in Rome, Italy, where his father, United States Army officer James Lawton Collins, was serving as military attaché ^[1]. The family moved often, as Army families did, and the young Collins spent parts of his childhood in Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Texas, and Virginia before settling in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans School ^[2].

Military service ran deep in the family. His father rose to major general, his uncle J. Lawton Collins became Army Chief of Staff during the Korean War, and his brother also pursued an Army career ^[4]. Collins followed the family path to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree ^[1]. Rather than join the Army, he chose a commission in the United States Air Force, partly, he later wrote, to avoid any appearance that his famous relatives had smoothed his way ^[1].

Collins earned his wings and flew F-86 fighters with squadrons based in California and France during the 1950s ^[2]. The work was demanding and sometimes dangerous: he once ejected from a burning aircraft over France and parachuted to safety ^[1]. In 1960 he was accepted into the Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the proving ground where many early astronauts learned their trade ^[4].

John Glenn's orbital flight in February 1962 convinced Collins that spaceflight was the next logical step for a test pilot. His first application to NASA was turned down, but he reapplied and was selected in October 1963 as one of fourteen members of the third astronaut group ^[2]. Over the next three years he trained on spacecraft systems and pressure suits while waiting for a flight assignment, work he described with dry humor in his later writing ^[1].

Collins first reached orbit in July 1966 aboard Gemini 10, flying with commander John Young. The three-day mission rendezvoused with two separate Agena target vehicles and used one Agena's engine to push the docked spacecraft to a then record altitude ^[3]. Collins performed two periods of extravehicular activity, becoming the first person to conduct spacewalks on two different days of a single mission and the first to travel to another orbiting spacecraft, retrieving an experiment package from a dormant Agena ^[3].

His defining assignment came three years later. As command module pilot of Apollo 11, launched on July 16, 1969, Collins remained aboard the command module Columbia in lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface in the lunar module Eagle on July 20 ^[2]. For roughly a day he circled the Moon alone, passing behind its far side once each orbit, cut off from all radio contact with Earth and his crewmates ^[1]. Reporters later called him the loneliest man in history, a label he rejected; he wrote that he felt not loneliness but awareness, satisfaction, and even exultation in his solitary command of the spacecraft ^[1].

His role was anything but passive. Collins had trained exhaustively for rendezvous contingencies, keeping a notebook of procedures for retrieving the lunar module under dozens of failure scenarios, and he executed the docking that reunited the crew for the voyage home ^[4]. Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific on July 24, 1969, completing the goal President Kennedy had set eight years earlier, and the three astronauts received ticker tape parades and the Presidential Medal of Freedom ^[2]. Any account of Michael Collins achievements has to weigh this quieter contribution fairly: without a skilled command module pilot, no one comes back from the Moon.

Collins met Patricia Finnegan, a Boston-born social worker, while stationed in France, and they married in 1957 ^[4]. The couple had three children: Kate, who became an actress known for the soap opera All My Children, and Ann and Michael ^[4]. Pat Collins died in 2014 after fifty-seven years of marriage ^[4].

Away from aviation, Collins was a private and self-deprecating man who preferred fishing, painting watercolors, and reading to celebrity appearances ^[4]. Unlike some Apollo colleagues, he largely avoided the lecture circuit and rarely signed autographs in later years, reasoning that dealers rather than admirers were the usual beneficiaries ^[4]. His prose revealed a reflective streak: he often said that seeing Earth from a quarter million miles away, small, shiny, and serene, made national quarrels seem absurd ^[1].

Collins left NASA in January 1970, six months after Apollo 11, declining the chance to command a later lunar mission ^[2]. He served briefly as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, then in 1971 became director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington ^[5]. He guided the design and construction of its new building on the National Mall, which opened to the public in July 1976, ahead of schedule and under budget, and quickly became one of the most visited museums in the world ^[5].

He stepped up to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian in 1978, later worked as a vice president at LTV Aerospace, and eventually ran his own consulting practice ^[2]. He retired from the Air Force Reserve with the rank of major general ^[2]. His 1974 memoir Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys, written without a ghostwriter, earned lasting praise for its wit and candor and is often ranked as the best book any astronaut has produced ^[6]. He followed it with Flying to the Moon, a version for younger readers, and Liftoff, a history of the American space program ^[7][8].

Collins died of cancer on April 28, 2021, at age 90 in Naples, Florida ^[4]. His family announced the death with a statement noting that he had spent his final days peacefully, and tributes came from NASA, the White House, and his surviving Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Michael Collins will find a figure remembered less for fame than for competence and grace. The basic Michael Collins facts, fourth American spacewalker, command module pilot on the first lunar landing, founding director of the modern Air and Space Museum, only hint at his influence ^[2][5]. A crater on the far side of the Moon, terrain he flew over alone, carries his name, as does the Michael Collins Trophy awarded annually by the museum he built ^[5].

Within spaceflight culture he became the model of the essential supporting crew member, the professional who accepts that someone must stay behind so others can make history. Writers and astronauts alike have cited Carrying the Fire as the most honest account of what flying to the Moon actually felt like ^[6]. Readers searching for a Michael Collins biography should note the frequent mix-up with his Irish namesake: the revolutionary leader died in 1922, eight years before the astronaut was born, and the two shared nothing but a name ^[4]. The astronaut, for his part, wore the confusion lightly, one more oddity in a life he chronicled better than anyone else could have ^[1].