Who was actually called “the loneliest person in the world” (even though at the time he wasn’t actually in the world) but dismissed the idea when he came back.
His name is Michael Collins and he went to the moon, but didn’t, unlike his two more famous colleagues, set foot on it. Instead he flew round it all on his own, waiting to pick up the other two.
Collins never became a household name like Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin after the 1969 moon landing, in part because Collins stayed behind to pilot the spacecraft while the other astronauts took their highly publicized moon walk.
Now imagine that. The nearest people to you are on the other side of a huge space rock. There’s only two of them. And the space rock is nearly a quarter of a million miles away from everybody else. Not only that, because you’re behind the space rock, your radio can’t receive anything, and you can’t transmit anything either, and this means that you are essentially completely isolated from your felllow man for forty-five minutes, All you’ve got is your tiny tin can. Not only is nobody going to help you if you get in trouble, nobody is even going to know you need any help because not only are you so isolated that nobody can hear you, there’s absolutely no possibility that even if they can hear you they can get to you.
After the moon landing, Collins was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, and inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame.
Collins retired from NASA in 1970, and deepened his legacy in space exploration as an early director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and he oversaw the facility’s construction in Washington, D.C., which became the world’s most popular museum after it opened in 1976.
He died at the age of 90!!
He was the last surviving member of the apollo crew!!!
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