Buzz Aldrin sole remaining survivor of Apollo 11 Moon landing
Obit Michael Collins, the one Apollo 11 astronaut too few remember, has died of cancer at the age of 90. Collins was the man who stayed in the Command Module Columbia alone in lunar orbit while his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history by setting foot on the Moon. But he never begrudged the pair for their time on the lunar regolith, and turned down further opportunities to visit our natural satellite. “Mike always faced the challenges of life with grace and humility, and faced this, his final challenge, in the same way,” his family said in a statement. “We will miss him terribly. Yet we also know how lucky Mike felt to have lived the life he did. We will honor his wish for us to celebrate, not mourn, that life.” Collins was already a veteran astronaut by the time Apollo 11 came around, having flown on the Gemini 10 mission three years earlier in 1966, in which he performed a space walk and docked his spacecraft with another. The mission went off almost without a hitch, though Collins did manage to drop his camera in orbit. Although he was in line for an Apollo 9 slot, a back operation and three months in a neck brace delayed Collins’ flight until Apollo 11, which lifted off on July 16, 1969. Three days later, the team reached the Moon’s orbit. As Armstrong and Aldrin descended in their lander, Collins stayed in orbit managing the command module, and was cut off from Mission Control for 48 minutes at a time – something he described as very peaceful. “I am now truly alone and absolutely alone from any known life. I am it,” he wrote in his log. While waiting, and prior to the mission, he also worked on contingency plans if something should go wrong, including how to pilot Columbia down to the Moon for a pickup if the Eagle lander’s launch from the surface wasn’t successful.
