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Collins' role in Apollo 11 is often minimized in the public conciseness, but I find it particularly fascinating from a human perspective. In certain ways it seems even scarier than Armstrong's and Aldrin's jobs. They at least had more direct control over their success in landing on the moon. Collins was largely powerless to help if something went wrong. If that did happen, he would have been faced with the choice of abandoning his crewmates to die on the moon and fly back to Earth himself. Meanwhile no one had ever been as far from other life as he was on that flight. When he was on the far side of the moon he was truly alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human history.

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I read an article some time ago about the opposite scenario. I searched for the article just now but didn't find it; would be curious if anyone has a link.

I remembered it something like this (but see soarfourmore's reply for a correction): what if the command module pilot became incapacitated but was still alive?

The lunar module could still dock with the command module, but the astronauts would not be able to get into the command module because the the CM pilot could not open the hatch on that side.

So their only option would be to do a spacewalk over to the command module and open an external hatch to get in.

The would not know at that point whether the CM pilot had his spacesuit helmet on or not, so they wouldn't know until they opened the hatch whether they had just killed him.

> The would not know at that point whether the CM pilot had his spacesuit helmet on or not, so they wouldn't know until they opened the hatch whether they had just killed him.

There were windows on the command module to look in, and if they weren't sure if he was responsive/unresponsive, they could tap iron onto the command module to let Collins know they were there and spacewalking.

It's an interesting thought process though, and I would appreciate the source if you can find it

Found it!

https://spaceflightblunders.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/lunar-o...

From the article, I was wrong about not knowing whether the CMP was alive:

"Unless there was a very serious issue with the CM’s communications systems, NASA would know of the CMP’s fate immediately. Every astronaut wears biomedical sensors at all times, as part of their constant-wear garment. This telemetry is sent to the flight surgeon."

More discussion here:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/45426/procedure-to...

A comment from that page:

"Probably the worst scenario would be for the CMP to be alive, but disabled and not in his spacesuit. There would be no way for the other astronauts to get to the CMP without depressurizing the CM, thus killing the CMP. It's an obvious choice between three astronauts stranded in lunar orbit, versus two getting home alive. Nonetheless, I can only imagine the regret that the astronaut who would have to depressurize the CM would have."

So it is even worse than the way I remembered it: the LM pilots would likely know that the CMP pilot was alive but incapacitated and they were about to kill him.

Apparently you can survive about 40 seconds in a vacuum. One option would be for one pilot to enter (as quickly as possible!) then put the CMP into a spacesuit, then re-admit the other astronaut. No clue if they could enter and re-pressurize the capsule within 30 seconds- sounds like a long-shot.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627561-700-maxed-ou...

It takes about 45 minutes to don a modern spacesuit -- and that assumes the person donning the spacesuit is assisting with the process, not incapacitated.

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/spacesuits/facts/...

Edit: This says it can actually be done in five minutes in an emergency if one's willing to skip every safety check, but getting an unresponsive person into one seems like surely it would be more of a challenge -- particularly if the "helper" was wearing a spacesuit himself. Those things are awfully restrictive! And I would wager it's not a scenario they practiced.

https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/how-do-you-put-...

I think they are suggesting:

- Enter the command module, in spacesuit

- Quickly re-pressurize

- Help incapacitated astronaut into suit (temporarily removing own suit if necessary)

- Once both suited up, open airlock again to admit remaining astronaut

But I’m not sure if that would have been possible. Was there really a way to re-pressurize in a few seconds, 2001 style?

> - Help incapacitated astronaut into suit (temporarily removing own suit if necessary) > - Once both suited up, open airlock again to admit remaining astronaut

These steps don't seem to be necessary. Since the CM can be opened from the inside towards the LM, the third astronaut could just wait in the LM and be let in that way.

I think the only question is really how quickly can you repressurize the CM.

It was basically a cone-shaped pressure vessel 3.23m tall and 3.91m wide, that's 51.71m^3 of volume. I'd estimate about 50% is taken up by machinery, so how fast can you repressurize 25m^3 to 1/3 sea level (which was apparently standard for the spacecraft)?

My guess would be it could be done pretty quickly, maybe 2 minutes?

Your insight suggests an even better solution: the spacewalking astronaut could open the internal hatch to the docked Lunar Module so its cabin air can instantly partially repressurize the Command Module

Maybe, IF the hatch can be opened when there is a pressure difference. It might be dangerous or even mechanically locked out in those cases. It may not, I have no idea.

I mean we're just guessing and spitballing here, and all of this assumes that whatever incapacitated the CMP is fixable by the other astronaut. But it does look like there may be a decent chance the CMP could survive this. Of course, he might have internal injuries or they might not be able to restart his heart. But seems like this procedure would be worth a try.

Opening the hatch was a huge pain. They'd have to disassemble the rather phallic docking mechanism (as Collins described it). Not being able to disassemble it was one of the fears Collins had about Apollo 11.

Similarly, Collins wrote a memo to the astronaut corps explaining that on the Mercury missions, if someone became incapacitated during EVA, they'd have to cut their life support cable and close the hatch and come home alone.

Very interesting and grim! But Mercury capsules only carried a single astronaut. You may be thinking of Gemini or Apollo?

If he was incapacitated slowly, he might have time to don a spacesuit, anticipating this scenario? NASA must know.

I've been in a number of situations myself where swift incapacitation would have killed me. This is common.

Looking at other times when astronauts became ill, they tended to tough it out until too late to put on a space suit.

You can survive vaccuum for a brief period of time.

> Flight recorder data from the single cosmonaut outfitted with biomedical sensors showed cardiac arrest occurred within 40 seconds of pressure loss. […] The autopsies took place at Burdenko Military Hospital and found that the cause of death proper for the cosmonauts was hemorrhaging of the blood vessels in the brain, with lesser amounts of bleeding under their skin, in the inner ear, and in the nasal cavity, all of which occurred as exposure to a vacuum environment caused the oxygen and nitrogen in their bloodstreams to bubble and rupture vessels. Their blood was also found to contain heavy concentrations of lactic acid, a sign of extreme physiologic stress. Although they could have remained conscious for almost 40 seconds after decompression began, less than 20 seconds would have passed before the effects of oxygen starvation made it impossible for them to function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11

If you want to see how disabling even a little loss of pressure can be, check it this video.

https://youtu.be/7wT9-zaK3Zo

I don’t know how fast they’d be able to enter and repressurize the capsule, but I suppose there’s a chance he could survive in that scenario. Though depending on why was incapacitated in the first place his chances may have even more diminished by whatever afflicted him.

What if the command module pilot became incapacitated but was still alive?

That's why one of the mission planning decisions was that the astronaut tasked with operating the orbiter must have previous time in space.

And they made him fly acrobatics in a jet shortly before the mission. ("Made" might be too strong a word since Collins thought it was fun.) NASA thought that might help train the inner ear to avoid the dreaded space sickness.

Apollo 15, 16 and 17 did perform nominal EVAs from the command module after the lunar landing, to retrieve film cassettes. To this day they are the only 3 deep space EVAs ever made. All others have been either in Earth orbit or on the moon.

To clarify, they were transearth EVAs, so they were not even during orbit around the moon. I recall seeing some upscaled videos on youtube of this which looked pretty unearthly.

https://www.history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-30_Extravehic...

Also, in the article linked below, Al Worden described his transearth EVA on Apollo 15 in which he could see both the entirety of the earth and moon simultaneously in his field of vision (the only person to do so in history?). He regrets not having a camera, but he later had an artist recreate the memorable view of the moon behind Jim Irwin (included in the article).

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/i-was...

Reminds me of Collins on Gemini 10. He did an EVA from further from Earth than anyone had ever been before. He took pictures of the Gemini capsule with Earth in the background. And then his camera fell off and drifted until space.

links to some vids:

https://www.drewexmachina.com/2017/12/17/a-history-of-deep-s...

I found one upscaled and interpolated to 24fps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI4ou1PpFH0

That's soooo cool. I love the audio "This is what it means to be a spaceman! Ok, back to work." Cowboys. Highly educated and extensively trained cowboys, but still cowboys and little kids.

> it seems even scarier than Armstrong's and Aldrin's jobs. [...] When he was on the far side of the moon he was truly alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human history.

This was used by Naoki Urasawa in his "20th Century Boys" manga series. The main villain, who has effectively isolated himself from his humanity, keeps repeating "I am Michael Collins", to describe his delusion of being at once the loneliest being ever and the one from which everyone else will eventually depend.

This might be one of the best villain "ticks" I've ever heard of.

All of humanity in one picture except for Michael Collins: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/63ztoy/all_of_hu...

The OG anti-selfie.

Collins also spent a lot of time outside of radio comms.

If something had gone wrong on the dark side of the moon, we might never have known what happened. We'd have had a perfectly cheerful conversation with the command module pilot, then a comms blackout, then nothing... With a lot of coordination, the lander crew could possibly have returned to the command module without Collins's support to find out what happened to him (and hopefully found a CM still in a condition to go home).

And for all that, he reported in his autobiography that it didn't bother him.

It seems to me that astronauts are selected precisely because they are not bothered by that kind of existential worry and fear. If something is wrong they work the problem and perhaps die trying.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn't read it, his autobiography is called Carrying The Fire, and is excellent.

Sorry to correct you. But the first person alone in lunar orbit was John Young during the Apollo 10 mission

While that's true, during Apollo 10 didn't the LEM and CM stay on the same side of the Moon?

The "loneliest" anecdote is based on how far away Michael Collins was from the next closest people. Since the LEM was on the other side of the moon once per orbit, Collins was much further away from other people than John Young got.

I'm unclear on what you are correcting. I didn't state he was the first to do a lunar orbit in his own spacecraft, but he was the first to do it without any other nearby craft. As far as I'm aware, the lunar module and the command module were never actually that far apart during Apollo 10. So while they were separated, the distance between the two was measured in hundreds of miles rather than the thousands of miles that was true during Apollo 11 and the later lunar landings.

Some mission parameters are at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10#Mission_parameters

The lunar orbit of the LM (Lunar Module) and CSM (Command-Service Module) had a period of 2.15 hours. The interval during which the LM orbited separately from the CSM was 8 hours 10 minutes, or about 3.8 orbits. Thus, at times both craft would have been on the far side of the moon. While the LM was in its lower orbit I don't know how much shorter its orbital period would have been, or whether it "lapped" the CSM during the time between closest approach and redocking.

Young also commanded STS-1, the first shuttle launch mission.

I just finished For All Mankind and this was one of the choices explored in the first season.

> Meanwhile no one had ever been as far from other life as he was on that flight.

Xkcd has a good fact check on this: it's just about plausible that some Polynesian or Antarctic explorer, the last survivor of a doomed expedition, was the furthest from any other human. But more likely it is the CSM commanders.

I note you say "other life" rather than "other humans", which would make it more clear cut in favour of Collins if we don't count whatever microorganisms travelled in Collins' gut and on every surface of Apollo.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/72/

I did think about that possibility which is why I wrote "life" and not "humans". Perhaps it should have been "visible life" or "non-microscopic life". Being alone on the ocean is certainly scary, but there is enough life and resources in the water to sustain someone basically indefinitely. Collins was alone beyond the tiny organisms that the crew brought up with them.

> Xkcd has a good fact check on this: it's just about plausible that some Polynesian or Antarctic explorer, the last survivor of a doomed expedition, was the furthest from any other human. But more likely it is the CSM commanders.

See Point Nemo:

> The oceanic pole of inaccessibility (48°52.5′S 123°23.6′W)[17] is the place in the ocean that is farthest from land. It lies in the South Pacific Ocean, 2,688 km (1,670 mi) from the nearest lands: Ducie Island (part of the Pitcairn Islands) to the north, Motu Nui (part of the Easter Islands) to the northeast, and Maher Island (near the larger Siple Island, off the coast of Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica) to the south. The area is so remote that—as with any location more than 400 kilometres (about 250 miles) from an inhabited area—sometimes the closest human beings are astronauts aboard the International Space Station when it passes overhead.[18][19]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceani...

There are sailing races (group and solo (and non-stop)) that venture into those waters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Race

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vend%C3%A9e_Globe

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Golden_Globe_Race

It's plausible. The moon's width is 2,158.8 miles, and I could imagine an explorer being >3000 miles from another human

The actual travel distance would be further because you can't just bore through the moon.

I'm too lazy to do the math, but what's the point-to-point distance (through the planet) of points that are 5000km along the surface?

Assuming a spherical earth, it's 4873 km.

Assuming a spherical earth in a vacuum... One of the few times that simplifying assumption matches reality.

Not quite; the Earth is an oblate spheroid. Assuming it's a sphere is certainly a close enough approximation for this exercise, though.

How far is it if you assume a flat earth?

5000km

> public conciseness

That was possibly an autocorrecto for "public consciousness", but I like how well it still applies.

I mean, a few guys stayed in orbit on subsequent lunar missions, but you're right, Collins was the first.

>he was truly alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human history

The "had" there was meant to imply it was true up until that point in history. Other people have either nearly matched or slightly exceeded him depending on the specific details of the later Apollo mission lunar orbits. However it is mentally easier to be the second person to do something dangerous once you see the first person succeed safely. There is a reason everyone knows Armstrong and Aldrin, but Conrad and Bean don't have much notoriety today in the general population.

For the sake of clarifying further:

At least according to usage that I'm familiar with, if the phrase were, "no other person has ever been", that would be talking about before or since. But "no other person had ever been" is only talking about history up until that point. "Has been" is the present perfect tense, and "had been" is the past perfect tense.

He also, during his orbits around the moon, was the most isolated human being alive, with thousands of miles to the next humans (Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon)

" When he was on the far side of the moon he was truly alone in a way that no other person had ever been in human history."

Well, in terms of distance maybe, but I would argue, a lone surviver on a shipwrack no one knows about, or in some dessert - would be more alone, than an astronaut, being watched and thought about by millions and in direct communication with peopke.

(was communication with earth possible, when the moon was in between?)

> Collins was largely powerless to help if something went wrong. If that did happen, he would have been faced with the choice of abandoning his crewmates to die on the moon and fly back to Earth himself.

He would have died in orbit then, just a little bit closer to the rest of mankind. There was no was way for him to return to solid Earth unless the lunar module came back. He was dependent on the outcome of the Lunar mission and he was not even allwed to set his foot onto Moon. One of my heros since childhood...

Err, this isn't correct. There would be be nothing preventing the command module from returning home in the event of the lunar lander not coming back from the moon. Though of course the command module pilot would be a bit more task-loaded.

I think you're thinking of the other way around - the LEM would have been unable to return to earth with the command and service modules. It lacked a heatshield.

> There was no was way for him to return to solid Earth unless the lunar module came back.

I'm not sure what you're basing that on. The Apollo 11 flight plan, available on the NASA website [1], shows LM jettison before TEI burn. That indicates that the LM was not needed for TEI. If for some reason the LM did not come back from the surface of the Moon, the CSM could still execute the TEI burn.

[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11fltpln_final_reformat.pd...

The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before TEI. Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations or some other maneuvers. That it was jettisoned before the burn tells us nothing about the necessity of the module up to the moment it was jettisoned.

> The LM does return to the CSM before the burn so it is conceivable it was needed for some preparatory step before TEI.

The flight plan makes clear that this is not the case.

> Perhaps a fuel transfer or some guidance calculations or some other maneuvers.

Even without reading the details of the flight plan, the LM was designed to carry just enough fuel to get down to the Moon's surface and back up again, with no extra fuel for other maneuvers; there wasn't any margin for any extra if the mission was to be doable at all. So it doesn't seem plausible that the CSM would have had to depend on getting some fuel transferred back from the LM in order to execute TEI.

As far as guidance calculations, that doesn't seem plausible either. The CSM, having been in a single stable orbit the whole time, would be expected to have much better guidance information than the LM, which had just executed a series of maneuvers, some of which were under manual control.

Sure, that all makes sense, and we know how it worked and that the LM was not needed. I’m just saying that we can’t infer the LM was unneeded for TEI just because it was jettisoned.

Hmm, wouldn't the simplest explanation for the LM returning to the CSM before the TEI burn be for the simple reason of returning the two crew-members who went to the lunar surface to the CSM before initiation of the TEI burn?

Yeah, of course, but that doesn’t mean that was the only reason, and since that had to happen maybe TEI relied on the return of the astronauts and/or LM from the Lunar surface.

My point was just that if our only information is that the LM returned to the CSM and was jettisoned before TEI we can’t deduce that the LM was not needed for TEI.

If that was the only information, then yes, we can't deduce whether it was, or was not, needed.

But there is other information available:

https://lithub.com/what-if-we-got-stuck-on-the-moon/

Command module pilot Mike Collins, who could only keep orbiting in the mothership while his comrades waited out the countdown to lunar liftoff, worried enough for all three of them. “I have been flying for 17 years, by myself and with others,” he would write in his post-mission memoir. “But I have never sweated out a flight like I am sweating out the LEM [liftoff] now. My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter. If they fail to rise from the surface, or if they crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life, and I know it. Almost better not to have the option I enjoy.”

Two key sentence fragements: "leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone" and "If they fail to rise from the surface, or if they crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith". Both indicate that Collins fully believed he could execute TEI should the LM fail to return. The only way he could possibly "return[ing] to earth alone" should the LM "fail to rise from the surface" would be if the CSM could execute TEI without the LM ever returning from the lunar surface.

Which would indicate that the LM was not required in any way for TEI.

The fact that Apollo 8 CSM flew to lunar orbit and back to Earth without any LM involvement easily defeats all your arguments.

A necessary fuel transfer, at least, wouldn't make sense. If fuel was needed to come back, sending it down and back again would have just meant wasting more fuel for no benefit to lug it there and back again.

Wait really? I never knew that. I thought the CSM had guidance and the main engine, why did he need the LEM to get home?

That's correct. He could have gotten home without the LM. (See Apollo 8, which didn't have an LM at all.)

> There was no was way for him to return to solid Earth unless the lunar module came back.

Where did you get that idea from? This is the first time I see someone claiming something like that.

Probably from the film Apollo 13, which depicts (likely wise) hesitance to fire the SPS due to suspected damage and instead firing midcourse correction burns with the LEM descent stage while attached to the CSM. By contrast, during the otherwise normal Apollo 11, SPS was responsible for returning Collins and the CSM to Earth (TEI) whether he retrieved Armstrong and Aldrin or not. The latter case was a rehearsed abort and the stakes were known, but the maneuver was otherwise the same as a normal TEI (excluding LEM jettison, obviously). Nixon’s backup speech illustrates this, as it eulogizes those two alone; Collins would have most likely returned on his own in that horrible circumstance barring a further failure of some kind.

> instead firing midcourse correction burns with the LEM descent stage while attached to the CSM.

The descent stage was left on the moon so that would have been the LM ascent stage. They had 2 separate motors for descent and ascent.

But indeed Apollo 13 was very different. I think on normal missions they only brought the LM back along for TEI so as not to litter the surface with crashed LMs.

Why make (wrong) guesses when you can find the answer in minutes on Wikipedia? Plus it doesn’t make sense to do a TEI with unnecessary mass. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module :

“The six landed descent stages remain at their landing sites; their corresponding ascent stages crashed into the Moon following use. One ascent stage (Apollo 10's Snoopy) was discarded in a heliocentric orbit after its descent stage was discarded in lunar orbit.“

Elsewhere, I read that the ascent stages were crashed into the moon to provide impulses for the seismometers left on the moon. Snoopy is still in orbit around the sun. And the one from Apollo 13 is in the Tonga Trench. Two fascinating lists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_in_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_...

As for littering the surface of the moon, I was surprised to see in videos that in addition to the scientific equipment ( and golf balls) they left on the moon, there was a lot of other little pieces. In one of the videos on the rover, they literally remove the cover off something and just throw it aside on the ground.

I was on my phone (materialistic app) so even a wikipedia search is difficult :) I hate using the web on a mobile, it feels like I'm looking through a toilet roll.

But I mentioned it was an assumption... The parent poster mentioned that the ascent stage was carried into TEI so I assumed that was true.

That is not true. They jettisoned the Eagle's ascent stage and returned with Columbia.

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