Astronomy: [Laughs]
Collins: So little by little, we got loaded up. People always ask, “What seat was yours?” There were three couches actually, side by side. The one on the left was the commander and it wasn’t like Neil’s seat, Buzz’s seat, and my seat; it just depended on what was going on. For launch, I was over on the right-hand seat. When we got up into orbit and we wanted to retrieve the LM from its little hideaway top of the Saturn, then I went and got in the left seat. That was part of my job. And most of the time, I might be in the middle seat fooling with the computer. So, all three seats were mine in a sense.
Our departure from launch pad 39A was a little different than certainly what I expected. You know, the Saturn V is such a gigantic thing — I think 7.5 million pounds of thrust from the five engines — you would expect that inside there’d just be a deafening roar, but not so. It was a lot quieter than you might imagine. We could hear each other on the radio and hear each other and the radio by itself, and the acceleration was very slight. It leaves the pad extremely slowly.
The surprising thing is it has to keep itself poised because it’s only 2 feet away from the tower, and if it goes sideways a little bit too far, it bumps into the launch apparatus. Of course, that [would be] the end of it right there. So, to compensate, you have to, in our case, use those rocket engines as swivels, and so they were swiveling back and forth to keep us absolutely straight upright and not bumping into the launch tower. And the sensation that we felt, I always describe it as a nervous novice driver driving a wide car down a narrow alley; he or she will be jerking the wheel back and forth a little bit to keep you on track and not hitting the walls of the alley.
And we had the same problem; so we went with these little spasmodic jerks for the first while, and then once we cleared and that all settled down, the rocket ride is pretty smooth. I think the Gemini went up to about 7.5 gs at its peak. On Apollo it was like 4.5 gs. So, it was a relatively easy ride. When the first-stage engine quit, there’s an instant of noise and confusion — not so much noise, but visual confusion as you get separation. It’s almost like an explosion. The stuff out your window, you’re not sure what the hell is happening, but it’s fire and man-made particles and craft out there, and that lasts just a second or two. And then you’re past it, and you’re into the second-stage burn.
The second stage during its testing had not been quite up to snuff as compared to the first and the third. They’d had some problems with it, and we were, I think, probably worried about that second stage — not excessively — but it turned out to be smooth as glass. It was a beautiful ride, and then the third stage took over briefly to put us into orbit around the Earth. The third stage was not quite as smooth with little hiccups here and there, but it worked fine. The next thing we knew, we were in Earth orbit.
Astronomy: Much has been made, of course, of Armstrong and Aldrin descending in the LM and the first moonwalk. But this was a three-man mission, and your orbiting overhead obviously was critically important. You’ve said that you’ve never really felt lonely when you were in lunar orbit. How did you feel once you got to the Moon?
Collins: Oh yeah, lonely. I tend to forget the word lonely, but you bring it back to me. Well, OK, when I got back from the flight, we were subjected to a lot of press inquiries. And when they came to me, most of them centered on, “Weren’t you the loneliest man in the lonely history of space, behind the lonely Moon all by your lonely self?” And what I say in my book is, “Geez, what are they talking about? I’ve got white mice on my mind.” We are in a lockup there at Houston, hoping we hadn’t brought any alien pathogens back from the Moon. And we have this colony of white mice — whom I liked, I liked to interact with them — and so these guys are talking about —was I what? Lonely?
Astronomy: [Laughs]
Collins: I thought their question was ridiculous. I was tempted to laugh at them, the press, but ooh, that’s a mistake because they can retaliate. So I simply said that I was too busy to be lonely; however, the truth was considerably different.
I was very happy with the command module. In a way, I thought that it was like a little miniature cathedral. I had the transept, if you will, or the three couches, and then I went down this aisle into the altar area. The altar was really our guidance and navigation station, and we didn’t have any clerestory windows, but we had nice lighting inside, and it was an elegant, sturdy, spacious place. It was my home. I was king, and you know, like most kings I had to be careful. Like, there goes fuel cell No. 3 acting up again.
I can’t say that I really was relaxed, but I was happy to be there, [and] I felt very much a part of the mission. I felt like I was doing a useful job and I felt included, not excluded, and so I was king of my domain, and I was very happy to be there that way and lonely — no! Let’s talk about white mice. Geez.
Astronomy: Can you describe what was going through your mind, hearing about the descent of the LM, the landing, the EVAs conducted by your colleagues? That must have been a fairly exciting but also tense time to hope that everything unfolded as it should have.
Collins: I wasn’t too worried about the landing. I thought that it was — I don’t want to say a straightforward procedure, but it was one that had been practiced over and over again. I thought that Neil somehow would find a place to land, and it turned out it wasn’t our first choice, but he overflew several boulder fields over several crater areas. He finally found a place that suited him with about 30 seconds or so of gas left, and I thought he did a masterful job. I had expected that he would, and I’m glad that everything worked out. There was a radio delay and I couldn’t really tell what was going on, and it made me anxious for a few minutes there, but then when I was told that they were safely down I was, you know, not stressed.
My worry had been the rendezvous subsequent. You know, we’re in the space program, we’re big believers in redundancy, and we had redundant equipment wherever it was possible. It was not possible in the case of the Lunar Module Ascent Engine. It was one engine, one engine bell — I suppose multiple lines leading into it, but at one point — one incident of combustion where the engine lights or doesn’t light. If it doesn’t light, they’re dead men, and so I was very worried about that aspect, their getting off the Moon.
And then, once they got off the Moon, if they got into a perfect trajectory — which they didn’t do — then the rendezvous and docking was something we had practiced over and over and over again. However, if there were variations on the theme — what if things didn’t get out of control exactly, but they got crazy? I was in orbit, zooming by some 60 miles overhead, and if they timed it perfectly with my approach, and then they lifted off — OK. And they got into an orbit below me and then later transferred up to my orbit.
If they were late getting off, I couldn’t have slowed down for them, so they would have had to catch me quicker, and the way you catch someone quicker in orbit is to go lower. So maybe they’re a little bit late, so they go lower in their orbit.
If they are later yet, the orbit’s gotta be lowered until they are just skimming the mountaintops of the Moon. If you’re a second or two later than that, the whole system reverses itself. Instead of going low, they have to go as high as they can go and let me, if possible, dip down — or then I have to make an extra turn around the Moon and catch them instead of them catching me. This is from a procedural point of view [and] is a totally different situation, and it’s just one of many.
Suppose they veer left or right? Suppose the orbit they get into is too high or too slow or too fast or too something or other? I had around my neck a book, a big book — 8-by-10-inch loose-leaf notebook kind of a book — with 18 variations of the rendezvous and docking. Some of them we had practiced over and over. Some of the others were so obscure, we never even practiced them in the simulator, but they were mathematically possible, and they could’ve happened. That’s the kind of stuff that I was worried about then.
I’d been worried about that for, you know, months before, and so once they got into a good orbit, I breathed a big sigh of relief. Once we got docked back together, a second sigh of relief. Then our next big hurdle was just — again, we were relying on one engine, but that engine — or TEI as we called it, Trans-Earth Injection — that was our get-us-home-burner.