Everybody's heard of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin,
the first humans to walk on the moon.
But do you recognize the name
Michael Collins? He was the command
module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission.
While the mission commander and the
lunar module pilot went down to the
surface, the command module pilots of the
Apollo program stayed in orbit around
the moon all alone. But why bring a third
person along? Without him
Neil and Buzz could have brought back an
extra Mike-sized pile of moon rocks for
scientists to study. Well, the command
module pilots were basically the
drummers of the Apollo rock band.
Without their piloting skills, the
missions wouldn't have succeeded. The
three-man Apollo mission design is
familiar to us now, but it wasn't the
only option NASA engineers came up with
in the early 1960's. One strategy was
called a direct descent: basically a
rocket would launch from Earth, fly to the moon,
land on it, then take off again when it
was time to leave. But this approach
would have needed a lot of fuel and if
you've seen the SpaceX attempts to land
their rockets on a drone ship, you know
how difficult a vertical landing can be.
So eventually the idea NASA settled on
for the Apollo missions was called a
lunar orbit rendezvous. A spacecraft
called the command service module or CSM
orbited the moon while a smaller ship
called the lunar module or LM went down
to the surface. Later the LM met up and
docked with the CSM in orbit--
that's the rendezvous--and together they
flew back to earth. For this mission
design to work, NASA needed at least
one person in each spacecraft and each
of the astronauts had a specialized job
to perform. Commanders like Neil
Armstrong were in charge of the whole
show and controlled the lunar module on the
way down to the moon's surface.
This meant the lunar module pilots, like
Buzz Aldrin, weren't actually piloting
but they did relay important navigation
information to the commander during the
descent. Plus, someone had to stay in the
orbiting CSM: the command module pilot.
And they had their hands full
the entire mission! Soon after launch
they had to perform the transposition
docking and extraction maneuver: they flipped
the CSM around and carefully docked with
the LM stored in the third stage of the
Saturn V, to extract it from the rocket.
The command module pilot's other big job
came during the rendezvous, since *they*
were responsible for the final docking
between the two modules. Because of these
complicated maneuvers, the most highly
trained Air Force and Navy pilots in the
pool of astronauts were assigned to the
role, like Mike Collins and Dick Gordon, the
CMP on Apollo 12. In fact when the Apollo
program was designed in the early 1960's,
no one had ever done a rendezvous in
space. In order to get ready for the moon
missions, both Collins and Gordon
practiced it on Gemini X and Gemini XI,
respectively, by docking and undocking
with an unmanned rocket called Agena
in Earth's orbit. So, they were chosen for
being amazing pilots, but these guys
didn't just sit around doing nothing
while their fellow crew members were on
the surface of the moon. NASA had these
astronauts make observations or relay
instructions down to the lunar surface.
Later Apollo missions were even designed
with a more scientific focus, especially
for the command module pilots. On Apollo 14,
for example, Stu Roosa took 950
pictures from orbit and found evidence
of ancient volcanic activity on the far
side of the Moon. But a camera couldn't
always be used to document the geology
because of the huge contrast between
light and dark regions on the surface. So
starting with Apollo 15, Alfred Worden
Ken Mattingly, and Ron Evans were
specially trained to identify geologic
features from orbit by sight. Their
descriptions gave scientists a better
understanding of the craters, mountains
and plains on the lunar surface, so we
could see how it changed over time and
which features were older than others.
Now getting to observe the moon up close
isn't quite the same as setting foot on
its surface, but Mike Collins has said he
was pleased to have a seat on the Apollo
11 anyway, even if it's arguably wasn't
the best one. And even though he might be
forgotten sometimes, his legacy lives on
at the very least through one iconic
photograph: it's a shot of the lunar
module just before the rendezvous with
the moon and the earth in the background.
Every single player in the Apollo
program and really every particle of
humanity is somewhere in that image...
except for one. Because it's a photo only
a command module pilot could take.
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