Remember Astronaut Michael Collins on the first moonwalk 50-years ago? No, I don’t either. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Actually I do. About every 2-hours Michael Collins, in the Command Module, Columbia, flew over Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong after their descent to the lunar surface in the Lunar Lander, Eagle, and were the astronauts who first walked on the moon.
. . . and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully — not as fear or loneliness — but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling.
Let’s backtrack a little. 3-Days earlier the Columbia crew fired their main engine, for TLI, that is Translunar Injection. This ‘burn’ set their trajectory away from orbiting earth in favor of traveling to the moon. That is: they pointed the Columbia to travel to where the moon’s position would be 3-days (approximately 40-degrees) ahead of the moon’s present position. You have to plan ahead, you know.
I have fortunately lived in the space-era, the ‘space race’ — ‘we HAD to beat those Russians’ to the moon, no second choice in the matter! Amazing what a little ‘friendly competition’ can accomplish. President Kennedy said in outlining the mission to go to the moon AND RETURN safely, “. . .not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Continue reading “talk about your social distancing. . .*”