The Pilot

Although Michael Collins never got the chance to actually step on the moon, his experiences in some ways were just as profound and offered a fascinating point of view for reflection. Collins piloted the command module of Apollo 11, making sure that moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had a way back home once they completed their time on the lunar surface.

So for the 21 hours they were on the moon, Collins was alone in the command module, orbiting the moon and spending 48 minutes of radio silence when his orbits took him to the far side. During his 18 trips into the most solitary condition any human being had ever experienced up until that time, he recorded some observations and later added them to his biography. One of the best-known was how he divided humanity into two groups during the blackouts: "three billion plus two over on the other side of the Moon, and one plus God-knows-what on this side.”

Collins had also prepared himself for the awful possibility that Armstrong and Aldrin's lunar module wouldn't fire or he wouldn't be able to rendezvous with them properly. Richard Nixon may have had a copy of the speech he would have had to have made, but Collins would have had to have flown back to Earth -- a three-day trip alone flying with only the memory of the other two astronauts beside him.

His death at 90 leaves just the eternal Buzz Aldrin alive from the first crew of human beings to leave this world and examine another sphere, as he now sets forth on a much longer journey.