The first man who did not go to the moon. But also the loneliest man in the universe up there, flying over the hidden face of the lovers’ satellite as Armstrong and Aldrin skipped through the craters with billions of eyes on them. Instead Michael Collins, he was not, he was the forgotten astronaut. He was waiting for them in orbit like a dad out of the nightclub, and he would take them home if all went well. “But if it had gone wrong I would not have committed suicide, I would have returned to Earth after having attempted the eighteen emergency maneuvers we had planned”.
The smartest pilot of all time left at ninety, now as small as a chick, shrunken like a mindful ET. Home phone. His home was the Columbia spacecraft that Collins ruled on the Apollo 11 mission, the first to the Moon (the other two, he instead to watch). “It was my tiny cathedral.” While the commander Neil Armstrong e Buzz Aldrin descended on a kind of spider, the Lem, to conquer an immensity of stones and silence (Aldrin came out in pieces, the second is not the first, he gave himself to alcohol, fell into depression, then he came out and now he is only he left to tell it), Michael Collins was preparing for the most difficult maneuver in the history of all the journeys from the Odyssey to today: perfectly fit Columbia and Lem, welcome the heroes back on board and be their magnificent, dark taxi driver to finally return down here among wives, children, mortgages, traffic lights and gas bills.
He was born in Rome, in via Tevere 16 (a marble plaque hanging on the wall remembers him) because his father was a soldier at the embassy, then he graduated from West Point, he became a fighter pilot, and with 4 thousand hours of flight on his shoulders he applied to join the second group of American astronauts: they discarded him. Instead, they took him with the third group, but a herniated disc prevented him from commanding Apollo 8. An apparent misfortune and a substantial fortune, because so he was selected for Apollo 11, the most important space mission in history. of NASA, but of all humanity.
Michael Collins was a serious and highly trained technician, with liquid ice in his veins. Absolute antidivo, when asked about that frightening loneliness flying over the hidden face of the Moon, without the possibility of communicating with the base, ultimately the most remote creature in the cosmos compared to us tiny earthlings, he shrugged and replied: “So what? ” And when he welcomed his companions into his capsule, he thought about how dirty they were and how much work it would cost to clean everything up before leaving.
Michael was introverted and creative, practically mute but able to strike the heart of the substance of things. They did not choose him by chance when it came to talking to the families of the astronauts who died on a mission, for example the friends of Apollo 1. And it was again he who designed the logo of Eagle, the lunar module. Anti-rhetorical by vocation, he never fell into the role of the third man, the embodiment of the hidden face of heroism, yet with metaphors he was a phenomenon.
He said, to explain the complexity of that journey: “Going to the Moon, and above all going back, is like building a necklace of daisies, it just takes nothing and it breaks.” Always far from emphasis, he was nevertheless able to be moved by remembering the image of the Earth as seen from up there: “It was so beautiful, so blue and small, it was all behind the tip of my finger. And I, looking at it, thought of how precious and fragile it was” . His latest tweet, a few days ago, said just that: “I’m sure if everyone could see the Earth floating just outside their windows, every day would be Earth Day.”
Now that the cancer has taken away this shy and kind alien, the man with a firm hand on the controls of the space module and no fear, the one who would become director of the aviation museum in Washington and would never sell himself. autograph, like some of his most famous colleagues, perhaps we will better understand the depth of his loneliness, and the metaphorical power of his destiny as a man in orbit: a complete revolution of the Moon every 47 minutes, waiting for two Godot harnessed by enormous bears whites. His imprint will forever be missing on the moon dust, but that was not Michael Collins’ job. Like everyone else, he had to wait for those who might return, but he had the stars on his side.
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