Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (5 page)

Once they had donned their 'Snoopy hats' (soft caps fitted with earphones and microphones), the astronauts completed the suiting-up process with the addition of a pressure helmet, a clear polycarbonate bubble. The suits were then filled with pure oxygen, which in space would allow them to replicate only a fraction of the pressure of Earth's atmosphere (3.7 psi as opposed to 15 psi). However, pressure as low as this allowed nitrogen within the body to break free of solution and collect in painful bubbles - a condition known to divers as 'the bends'. In its mildest form this effect is familiar to all of us: it's thought that 'cracking knuckles' can be attributed to bursting bubbles of nitrogen. In space, nitrogen collects in joints, particularly elbows and knees, and to prevent this the astronauts purged their body of the gas by breathing pure oxygen for more than three hours before launch. Dependent on portable supplies of pure oxygen, connected to the suit via a tube, the three men were sealed off from any physical contact with friends and colleagues waiting to bid them farewell. 'You peer at the world, but are not part of it,' wrote Michael Collins. He secretly found pressure-suits to be unsettling and even claustrophobic, so much so that he had once considered confessing all and leaving the programme.
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In the weeks before the flight, Collins had attracted almost as much press attention as Armstrong, for the fact that he would
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be walking on the Moon. As the only member of the crew who would remain aboard the command module throughout the mission, he had been repeatedly asked about his fears of isolation. Despite the growing press attention he maintained a sang-froid that later earned him a reputation as Apollo 11's philosopher. Unencumbered by Neil's focus or Buzz's ambition, Michael occasionally managed to indulge a sense of detachment from his role as the command module pilot, not to mention the mission overall, and even NASA itself.

This relaxed attitude to life developed during childhood when he learned to adapt to the succession of new homes and schools that were part and parcel of life in a military family. His distinguished father, Major General James Collins, had served in the Philippines in 1911, where he had flown aboard the wing of a Wright Brothers aircraft. During an appointment to Italy as a military attaché, Michael, his fourth child, was born, in Rome on 31 October 1930. After returning to the States, the family moved to Governor's Island in New York Bay, then to Baltimore, Ohio, and Texas before being sent to Puerto Rico where they lived in a 400-year-old house. To ten-year-old Michael it seemed that no other home could offer such an immense ballroom, gardens teeming with tropical animals, and a brothel at the end of the road. Later he remembered that the girls would 'toss me money if I would talk to them but I never would'. Through his father's connections and varied postings, Michael came to acquire a broader understanding of the world than some of his NASA contemporaries.
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At school he was capable and athletic, and while he developed a love of books he also became known as a prankster. 'I was just a normal, active, troublesome kid. I liked airplanes and kites, and climbing trees and falling out of them. I didn't like school much.' He also shared Armstrong's interest in model aircraft, but for Michael it was an occasional hobby that was never as important as football and girls.

Following the family tradition, Collins attended West Point Military Academy, principally for a free education rather than to pursue an interest in the army. He could have made much of the fact that his father was a general and his uncle, a corps commander on D-Day, was now the army's chief of staff. But Michael played down his connections, to the point that after graduating in 1952 he declined to join the army at all, choosing the air force instead. After training at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, in 1954 Collins was sent to an F-86 fighter squadron that was soon transferred to Chambley-Bussières, a NATO base in north-eastern France.

At Chambley in early 1956 Michael met 21-year-old Patricia Finnegan. Pretty, with a vivid smile, Pat was a graduate in English who was working for the air force as a civilian. To her, Michael looked 'just as dashing, just as white-scarfy, as the others', but she was impressed by his knowledge of fine wines and French cuisine, along with his love of books and interest in the theatre. She thought he was simply 'lots and lots of fun', and above all she admired his approach to life: 'It was, and is, that everything will be OK; that everything will work out.' They married on 28 April 1957, and returned to the States a few months later.

Initially Michael had intended to complete his required four years in military service before finding something he was more suited to (his mother had suggested the State Department), but in France he found that flying had become a passion. Rather than leaving, he looked at how he might channel a restless desire for fulfilment. Collins felt the best way to get on was to become a test pilot, and he sought to accumulate the hours required by the air force's test pilot school at Edwards. Flying a variety of aircraft, Michael moved from post to post until August 1960, when the school eventually accepted him.
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As a trainee test pilot, Collins learnt to 'observe, remember, and record every last movement of a bucking, heaving, spinning plane', doing so with such proficiency that on graduation he was the only member of his class assigned to test fighter jets.

During 1961 the number of available test-flights began to dwindle and Collins found himself casting his eye further afield. Rumours that NASA was about to hire a second group of astronauts were confirmed in April 1962, and Collins, in contrast to Armstrong's dawdling, applied 'before the ink was dry on the announcement'.
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Manned space-flight was still in its infancy, and with scant information on the long-term effects of orbital missions NASA felt obliged to inspect the health of its applicants in great detail. Candidates were strapped to a table and their cardio-vascular response measured after they were jerked upright. In other tests, cold water was poured into one ear, 'eyeball pressure' was assessed, and one foot of bowel was examined using a rectal 'steel eel'. After being poked, prodded and pierced, Collins felt that 'no orifice was inviolate', the medics only giving way in order to allow the psychiatrists to take over. When asked to describe a sheet of white paper, Collins wondered what he should say. 'Perhaps I see a great white moon in it, or a picture of Mother and Dad, with Dad a little larger than Mother. Second-guessing the shrinks is not easy.'
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He scored highly in the two-month selection process, but his lack of postgraduate study and his limited test-flight experience were deemed insufficient compared to the likes of Armstrong, and ultimately he was rejected.

Just nine men were successful, including Armstrong, despite his late application. This was thanks to the support of Dick Day, a friend who had already made the move from Edwards to Houston. An expert in flight simulators, Day had been appointed as assistant director of the Flight Crew Operations Division and in this capacity he acted as secretary to the selection panel. He admitted that he and a number of others valued Armstrong's experience and wanted him to apply, so when Neil finally got round to it Day quietly slipped the late application into the pile along with the rest.
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In October 1962, while the New Nine settled into the space programme, Collins went back to Edwards, where he set about building the experience he needed. Fortunately the air force had begun to teach the science of orbital flight to hand-picked graduates of its test pilot courses, and Michael was able to spend six months acquiring the knowledge he lacked. In June 1963 NASA again asked for astronaut applications, and after another session with the 'steel eel', Collins was successful.
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Accompanied by Pat and their three children Kate, Ann and Michael junior, in October 1963 Collins headed south to Texas.

By the time the fourteen new recruits arrived in Houston, NASA was preparing to take the next step towards one day reaching the Moon. In the end there had been six Mercury flights, the longest lasting a little over 34 hours. This mission had provided valuable data, but a trip to the Moon might last anything up to two weeks and many questions had yet to be answered. Just how dangerous were the belts of radiation surrounding the Earth, which threatened to harm anyone venturing near them for too long? How long was too long? At least their location could be identified; solar flares, on the other hand, which also posed a radiation risk, were in 1963 largely unpredictable. After arriving on the Moon, would the crew and their 'lunar lander' spacecraft vanish into a thick blanket of dust, as suggested by Professor Thomas Gold of Cornell University? Other eminent scientists feared that if the lander did successfully settle on the surface, a charge of static electricity would attract so much dust that nobody would be able to see out of the windows. No-one was going to fly all the way there and back without actually stepping out of the spacecraft, but how could an astronaut be protected from the vacuum of space or the extreme temperatures of light and shade? The Moon was pockmarked by countless meteoroid craters, but just how often did meteoroids hit the surface? Continuously? Did lunar soil contain pure metallic elements that would spontaneously combust when carried by dirty boots into the pure oxygen that filled the lander's cabin?
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What should the lander even look like?

The years 1963 and 1964 were dominated by the search for answers to questions such as these, early results being drip-fed into training sessions. Since everything was geared towards a lunar landing, the training included a series of geology lectures. The Mercury veterans grumbled about learning to describe grey, lumpy stones as 'hypidiomorphic granular, porphyritic, with medium-grained grey phenochrists', but to the new recruits the lectures brought the Moon a little closer. Nevertheless, Collins sometimes found the lessons a little dull, particularly when he found himself trudging along on the back of a mule after one of the field trips. 'From supersonic jets at Edwards,' he later wrote, 'I had progressed all the way to kicking a burro up out of the Grand Canyon.'
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Between lessons, the Mercury Seven, the New Nine and the Fourteen, as the press referred to them, toured launch facilities at the Cape and inspected the new Mission Control Center in Houston. They also underwent survival training, learning to live off the land in deserts and jungles in case they came down somewhere beyond immediate reach of help. During environment training they were exposed to the noise, vibration and weightlessness of space-flight, enduring trips in what was then referred to as the 'zero-g airplane', better known today as the 'vomit comet'. As well as attending the training sessions, each astronaut also had to take on a particular area of research, representing the Astronaut Office in design meetings and test sessions. Armstrong worked on flight simulators;
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Collins was asked to help develop pressure-suits and other equipment that would be used during space walks (properly referred to as extra-vehicular activity, or EVA).

Many of the difficulties accompanying a flight to the Moon were to be explored during a series of orbital research flights, and accomplishing a successful EVA was close to the top of the list. The Mercury capsule was too small for most of this work (it was said you didn't board it so much as put it on), and by 1965 its replacement was ready to fly. Capable of accommodating two people for days at a time, the bigger Gemini spacecraft replaced Mercury's small hatch with wide hinged doors. It was intended that during the first Gemini EVA an astronaut would open the doors, stand up and simply look around. But, as before, Russian advances forced NASA to quicken its pace. On 18 March 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to leave his spacecraft during a flight. Pictures released to the international press showed him waving to the camera as he floated comfortably above the Earth. But with the Soviet secrecy that was typical of the time, the Russians did not reveal the difficulty Leonov experienced in returning to his spacecraft, Voskhod 2. While floating in space, his pressure-suit ballooned and despite an anxious struggle during which he suffered the first symptoms of heatstroke, he was unable to climb back through the airlock. After losing 12lb in body weight, Leonov was forced to partially deflate his suit – a dangerous move under any conditions. The Russians found through hard experience that returning to a spacecraft after an EVA was far from easy. Collins independently came to the same conclusion while taking part in tests aboard the zero-g aircraft. In a memo, he warned that an 'extravehicular astro requires all his strength and agility to get back inside the spacecraft'.
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It was a lesson NASA was slow to learn.

Astronaut Ed White, Collins's close friend from West Point, strenuously objected to the warnings, going on to make the whole process look easy while performing America's first EVA three months after Leonov.
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With nothing to do but enjoy himself, White found he could easily move through space using blasts of oxygen from his 'zip gun'. For more than 20 minutes he freely floated above the Earth until ordered back into his spacecraft by Mission Control. The public fell in love with Ed's boyish enthusiasm, and his triumphant accomplishment encouraged NASA to race ahead with ambitious plans for future EVAs.