Story Details - Alumni - Harvard Business School

18 Jul 2019

Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins Reflects on the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing

Re: Michael Collins (AMP 69)

Topics: Engineering-Aerospace History-General Leadership-General

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of 1969’s successful Apollo 11 voyage, Michael Collins (AMP 69, 1974) has been sharing his memories of the famous, three-man moon mission.

Collins played a critical support role while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed their lunar module and took their “one giant leap for mankind.” Here’s how his experience is described in a recent Atlantic article on the anniversary:

He didn’t witness the landing; his spacecraft sped on after he dropped off the two other astronauts, and the view from that height is nothing but craters. He did hear Armstrong’s voice crackle over the radio, telling Mission Control he and Aldrin made it. Collins circled the moon, completely alone, for more than a day. He listened as his fellow astronauts walked around the jagged terrain in their puffy white suits, unpacked science instruments, and scooped rocks into boxes. The voices vanished every couple of hours, as Collins’s command module slipped behind the moon, where neither the astronauts nor Mission Control could reach him. The views were stunning all around. But for Collins, the finest sight was the lunar module returning, a small dot moving in the distance, a speck of black against the gleaming gray. Soon Neil and Buzz would be back inside. They could all go home.

In an interview in Popular Science, Collins, now 88, discusses his route to mission, which included a West Point education followed by a stint as an Air Force pilot before joining NASA. “It wasn’t like all of sudden I was lying on my back one night looking up into the night sky and, bingo, next thing you know I was on the moon,” Collins told the magazine. “It was a very long, stair step system of progression.”

The interview also touches on Collins’s orbit around the moon—a 21-hour-long solo trip during which he was cut off from communications with Mission Control for almost an hour and a half. Collins notes that he is frequently asked about his mental state during that period, but responds that he had a pretty clear focus:

You know what was on my mind when he asked me that? White mice. We were locked up in these big fancy series of rooms. But there was the white mice room. If the white mice died, we were in deep trouble [because it meant that we had brought back a deadly pathogen].

So, when they were asking about me being lonely, I kept thinking ‘what the hell are they talking about?’ I was worried about those white mice at the time, worried about something sensible. Neil, Buzz, and I went to the moon and back. Was it a success or a failure? It all depended on those white mice.