Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

by Michael Collins

“We need a new economic paradigm to produce prosperity without growth.”

if at one hundred miles, one orbit takes an hour and a half; if we go up to 22,300 miles, one orbit takes twenty-four hours. So what? Well, the earth also takes twenty-four hours to go around once, so that the 22,300-mile satellite will stay over the same spot on the ground, i.e. be synchronous with the earth’s rotation, which is fiendishly clever if you want to use it as a communications-relay satellite. Interesting applications of boring equations.

Who would suspect that (Fe2+ ,Mg) Ti2O5 would be discovered at Tranquility Base in 1969 and that this new mineral would be called “armalcolite,” a name derived from the initial letters of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins.

We are so far away the sound hasn’t reached us yet, but when it does, it is a surprise, a jolt, a shock—even for one who thought it overdue. God, it’s not a noise, it’s a presence. From tip of toes to top of head, this machine suddenly reaches out and grabs you, and shakes, and as it crackles and roars, suddenly you realize the meaning of 7.5 million pounds of thrust—it can make the Cape Kennedy sand vibrate under your feet at a distance of four miles. Supposedly, the acoustic energy kills birds who fly by too closely; what must it be like to ride one?

A truer or more concise description of flying between earth and moon is not possible. The sun is pulling us, the earth is pulling us, the moon is pulling us, just as Newton predicted they would. Our path bends from its initial direction and velocity after TLI in response to these three magnets. Up until now the earth’s influence has been dominant, but by late tomorrow the moon will take over and our speed will begin to increase again.

We have missed hitting the moon by a paltry three hundred nautical miles, at a distance of nearly a quarter of a million miles from earth, and don’t forget that the moon is a moving target and that we are racing through the sky just ahead of its leading edge. When we launched the other day, the moon was nowhere near where it is now; it was some 40 degrees of arc, or nearly 200,000 miles behind where it is now,

However, since the moon is much smaller (2,160-mile diameter vs. the earth’s 7,927), we get around it almost as fast, taking two hours for one orbit instead of ninety minutes. Also, because we are in a lower orbit (you can’t orbit the earth at sixty miles because of its atmosphere), we get a noticeable sensation of speed.

I am not normally emotional about machines, and I consider graffiti the exclusive province of morons in train stations.