MATT PORTER: 50 years ago today, American astronauts landed on the moon. We will speak with astronaut Michael Collins who accompanied Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on that historic Apollo 11 mission, and we'll ask him about his role piloting the command module and where he sees our space program headed on this episode of JFK35.
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MATT PORTER: Welcome to this special bonus summer episode of JFK35, a podcast by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. I'm Matt Porter. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and President Kennedy's vision that launched the effort, the JFK Library hosted a space summit where extraordinary groups of scientific and business pioneers gathered to discuss the legacy of JFK's moonshot and what lies ahead for the future of space exploration.
In this episode, my co-host Jamie Richardson and I spoke with Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins about his experience flying to the moon and his thoughts on the future of men and women in space. We'll take you to that interview right now.
Well, the first thing we want to talk to you about is your time with the Apollo program. Can you describe your role in that Apollo 11 mission for us?
MICHAEL COLLINS: Well, I was kind of the base camp operator, you could say. I was in an orbit 60 miles in a circle overhead while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked upon the moon. And they needed to come back to my command module, the Columbia, so I could take all three of us and come home.
So that was my primary function. But the thing was kind of put together to be operated by three people most of the time, so we just didn't exactly toss coins for it, but, like, oh, you do this, and I'll do that, and we can let Buzz take care of the other sort of an arrangement.
MATT PORTER: So what was it like on that mission, especially knowing that it might be the historic first time a man would walk on the moon in that particular mission?
MICHAEL COLLINS: Well, I think any flight to the moon is a long and delicate daisy chain of events. All the way up, you have the certain key points, certain things, certain tasks that have to be done exactly on time and so forth. So, unfortunately, it's never, at least it was never with me, a time for great relaxation or congratulating myself and the other two on everything we had done.
At a certain point there, we were always, to the contrary, looking to what is coming just ahead. And so it was a nervous kind of an eight-day trip. But fortunately, our machinery worked just extremely well, absolutely as advertised, maybe even a little bit better. And that made our job a lot a lot easier. But it was still tense and not a very relaxing situation.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: This is Jamie here. So you wrote the autobiography Carrying the Fire a few years later, which covers your time as a test pilot in the Air Force and with NASA as an astronaut. What led you to write this book?
MICHAEL COLLINS: Well, I don't know. That's a good question. Why do writers write books? I think you get kind of an itch inside you, and you think, gee, I ought to somehow not lose track of all these nice things that have happened to me.
And so the way you not lose track is to scribble them down on a little yellow notepad. And the next thing you know you think, god, I ought to organize that a little bit more. And you sort of come around to creating the notion of a book and filling in some of the squares and kind of going on from there, at least that was my thought process. It was nothing that I really sat down one day and said, oh, I am going to write a book.
MATT PORTER: Well, in that book, from what I've heard, is sometimes being read by current astronauts sort of as a lesson. How do you feel that that's being used by astronauts now and potentially in the future?
MICHAEL COLLINS: Well, I always tell them, oh, hey, don't read that smut. No, seriously, I'm thrilled if anyone of that ilk at that time coming into the space program wants to read about what it was like for me coming into it and going on through the years. It was a fascinating job. And gosh knows, they don't need me to tell them how to go about doing it. But if they want one version of it, I'm glad they remember the old book.
MATT PORTER: When you were here on June 19, you got the question that astronauts are sometimes held up as heroes for many in their imagination. But you kind of said on June 19 that you don't like being called a hero. Why is that?
MICHAEL COLLINS: Well, I think our concept of heroism has gotten warped and twisted over time. The other day I heard two people talking oh, did you hear Fred on that talk show the other night? Oh, what he said. He was so brave. He is my hero.
Well, I go back to the terminology labored through and printed out by the Committee on the Congressional Medal of Honor, which said that the recipients should be someone who has performed duty-- whose performance was above and beyond the call of duty. And we astronauts are pretty good. We did our jobs very well. But that's what we'd been hired on to do.
We did not perform above and beyond the call of duty. We have plenty of heroes in our everyday life. I think you can probably find one-- a nurse in an emergency ward doing one thing or another that's above and beyond the call of duty. But not astronauts. I would definitely not put astronauts any way, shape, or form in that category of being a, quote, "a hero," just a hard worker.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And so being here at the JFK Library, we have to obligatorily ask you a question about JFK. So he famously said he wanted to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely to Earth. Can you remember where you were when you first heard those words or heard of that concept?
MICHAEL COLLINS: You know, I don't remember. Did we have a Kennedy Library at that time? No, no, no, I don't think so. I would have been in the Kennedy Library listening, I hope, to hear those words. But no, unfortunately, I cannot remember where I was.
MATT PORTER: What about, as far as when JFK made the statement calling people to do what you can to make the mission to the moon a success, how did you relate to that call as someone who was in the astronaut corps?
MICHAEL COLLINS: I thought that President Kennedy's speech, that short speech, was a masterpiece of direct simplicity. It told us what we had to do, and it told us when we had to do it. And we just had to figure out and insert the how we were going to do it. But it was of immeasurable value to us as we went about our daily labors.
We'd get peoples behind on their schedule, and we'd beat them up a little bit about President Kennedy said this and we're going to do by the end of the decade, and it's coming up soon. And you've got to do better on the other. And we don't have enough money, yes, you can find the money, and so on. Little by little, we used Kennedy's words over and over and over again. And it was just a remarkably wonderful mandate for us.
MATT PORTER: Speaking about then and now, many of the early astronauts, the Gemini, the Apollo programs were all men. Now, we see more diverse astronauts, women astronauts, black, Latino, Asian astronauts, astronauts from all over the world. How do you feel has that diversity improved space program, not only in the US, but for the global space program?
MICHAEL COLLINS: You know, I've often wondered, I haven't gone back to Houston where I lived as an astronaut to ask the current Trump crop down there, but I would guess if I asked, hey, how are the women astronauts doing, I would bet some money that the answer would be doing about like the men, only a little bit better. I think women are absolutely as qualified as men to do that job.
And if they sort of have a little additional pressure put on them because they are women and they are representing a minority point of view, that's a further incentive for them to do even better. So my guess is if you go down and ask NASA today, well, I don't know if you could ask NASA, the bureaucrats, but ask NASA the people who know astronauts today, I guess it'd go about 51%-49% women over men.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: In the early 1960s space race, it was really important to beat the Soviets to the moon and to have the supremacy. But now we see with the International Space Station, there's people from all over the globe working together for some united causes. So how has that changed the view of space exploration? And how has that benefited all of us?
MICHAEL COLLINS: When we were in the midst of the Apollo program, we felt, to some extent, we were in competition with the Soviet Union. We knew that they had a space program and that they'd had sound foundations on it going back 100 years or so with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. So we respected them as competitors. But if anything, the broader the input, the better the product is apt to be.
MATT PORTER: As someone who went to the moon and now people are talking about going back to the moon, or the next stage being-- the next destination being Mars, where do you would like to see the space program headed? Do you want us to head back to the moon? Or do you think we should just go straight to Mars or somewhere in between? What are your thoughts as someone who has actually been to the moon?
MICHAEL COLLINS: I think that the amount of study that's gone into this latest national program on going back to the moon and forming various ellipses that point in the direction of Mars and using the resources of the moon, all of that has been clearly thought through. My friend Neil Armstrong, for example, who was a lot better engineer and planner than I was thought that there were enough gaps in our knowledge about Mars that it would be advantageous to fill some of those chinks with precursor missions at the moon.
But I look at all those experts, and I say, no, I don't agree. I'd like to go direct Mars, you could call it if you want, the JFK Mars Express. Just as President Kennedy told us to the moon by the end of the decade, I'd like to see someone tell us to Mars by the end of some decade and use all our resources in going directly. And I would definitely bypass the moon. I don't think it's necessary to stop over there.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And we just wanted to ask one last question before we let you go. How did going to the moon change your perspective of Earth? At such a dramatic and exciting endeavor you did, how did that change the way you look at things?
MICHAEL COLLINS: Going to the moon, seeing the moon up close was marvelous. But compared to the view of the Earth, I thought the moon was nothing. I thought that tiny little thing out my other window was the whole show. The Earth was just gorgeous. Tiny little shiny blue and white, a smear of rust across it that we called the continents, a glorious sight.
And oddly enough, it projected to me not only a glimpse of great beauty, but a fragility somehow. The little thing seemed fragile. And when you analyze the conditions here on Earth, it is indeed fragile. So the more that we can do to help that planet stay whole and to beef up some areas of its fragility, that's what we should be spending our time doing.
MATT PORTER: Michael Collins, thank you so much. A man who was able to go to the moon and celebrating the 50th anniversary of that trip this July. Michael, thanks for being with us.
MICHAEL COLLINS: Well, thank you. And thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing at the Kennedy Library. Wonderful facility you have there, and best of luck with it and to both of you.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you so much.
MATT PORTER: Take care.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Bye.
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MATT PORTER: Well, thank you for listening to our special interview with astronaut Michael Collins. If you have questions or story ideas, email us at JFK35 pod at JFKLFoundation.org, or tweet at us at JFK Library using the hashtag #JFK35. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And if you liked what you heard today, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving us a review. Thank you for listening, and stay tuned for a couple more space special episodes coming up next week.
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