Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

by Michael Collins

All that stuff about crew psychological compatibility is crap. Almost anyone can put up with almost anyone else for a clearly defined period of time in pursuit of a mutual objective important to each.

The CSM gently placed its probe inside the LM’s drogue, as an old lover might,

I finally realize why Neil and Buzz have been looking strange to me. It’s their eyes! With no gravity pulling down on the loose fatty tissue beneath their eyes, they look squinty and decidedly Oriental. It makes Buzz look like a swollen-eyed allergic Oriental, and Neil like a very wily, sly one.

Nor am I above telling the police officer when I am stopped for speeding, “Gosh, Officer, I guess I just haven’t learned to slow down since I got back from the moon.”

We cannot launch our planetary probes from a springboard of poverty, discrimination, or unrest; but neither can we wait until each and every terrestrial problem has been solved. Such logic two hundred years ago would have prevented expansion westward past the Appalachian Mountains, for assuredly, the Eastern seaboard was beset by problems of great urgency then, as it is today.