Carrying the Fire

Michael Collins
Published: 1974
Read: 7/30/22

I just don’t know how long it takes, except that it had taken me thirty-five years to reach crew quarters at Merritt Island, Florida, and on July 17, 1966, I felt ready. I felt it had taken exactly the right amount of time.

Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire, 1977

Carrying the Fire is the story of Michael Collins, a man who went to the moon. A man who used a period of his life, to achieve this singular purpose above all else.

I started this book while on a plane ride to LAX to support the flight test of a customer that was in dire need of getting my flight test equipment to work inside their vehicle. Equipment that should work for them but in this case definitely did not. Reading Carrying the Fire on that plane, reminded me that I’m living with the descendants of everything NASA did technologically on Apollo. The current commercial space sector with SpaceX (documented in Liftoff) and Blue Origin as NASA prepares the return to the moon on the new Artemis missions. I’m also a bit embarrassed that I never dug into this period of rapid exploration and innovation and discovery until now.

The closest I’ve come to reading about astronauts is the Chuck Yeager book, Yeager in fifth grade. My dad (and dads everywhere who love airplanes) was wild about that book of faster than Mach 1 flight. For context Yegars time was happened in the late 40s and he brushed up against NASA in 62, according to Wikipedia. And speaking of other aviation icons the introduction to the book was originally written by Charles Lindbergh.

Returning to the book, Collins describes his life pre-1969, the life of a fighter pilot that changed into something entirely different by the end. It will become an astronaut’s life. Collins is a man who thrives off of going faster and doing things that will surely get him killed, two things that do not motivate me in the slightest. In truth, I get my heart racing and hair on end from nothing more than the stress of a presentation talk or design review. Although all events were documented in detail the book is written with very little discussion of why Collins continued to move in this direction. Was he detached from the situation or embraced it entirely? Any doubts or internal monologuing of this sort is kept out of Carrying the fire for the most part to keep with the momentum of his part in Apollo.

We found naïve people who sincerely believed that if an astronaut said it, it must be so, and shrewd people who enticed us into making pronouncements that could be used to reinforce their own parochial viewpoints.

Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire

Collins sketches out a meandering road to get to the NASA program. Never did it appear that Mike dreamed of being an astronaut (perhaps because the profession only existed five years before he did it) but he takes it as a matter of course that it was his chosen path. Perhaps that’s the military piece of this man. Grow up take orders push the limits but there are always orders and directions.

The detail on all the procedures and methods associated with the moon mission really got me. I also laugh because Seveneves proved to be as reliable as this book when referring to orbital mechanics, which I suppose is good on Stephenson. Of particular note is the construction of the space suit and the iterations to trade off safety and mobility which was extremely lacking.

I’ve never heard the Apollo story from front to back, so many events captured me the whole way through. Ten astronauts tragically died during the course of the mission. A few of them dying in airplane crashes before getting anywhere near the pad. Four dying because of the pure oxygen environment on the pad being ignited by some failure and the team at NASA speculating if they suffocated before they were burned. The entire logistics of setting positions related to the stars only being checked by a computer that could seemingly only run those computations.

If the pilot moves his hand an inch or two sideways, he instantaneously commands three thousand pounds per square inch of hydraulic pressure to actuate cylinders which deflect large ailerons into the speeding slipstream.

Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire, 1977

Collins also clearly is speaking to the reader from another era. He brings up that running every day is very beneficial in a way that your friend would when they have brought up drinking low grade snake venom helps their skin. He jokes about needing martinis and chasing women in a multiple sections of the book, and he was young to middle aged married man in the duration. Mostly the book is, a pilot and a military man (not to imply lack of education) telling his part in the exploration of a new frontier.

As Collins describes in words the vastness of space and the exiting of the atmosphere and all the views that did and did not get back to early on film I find myself looking up more often. And thinking on what a life is if not pushing to do something incredible and then surviving or not. This was a fantastic book I would recommend to anyone who has wanted to explore or do something with their lives that mattered and understood the sacrifices and time scale of accomplishing those things.

In my own view, the pendulum has swung; rockets are about as interesting as the powder which propels a bullet. To be fascinated by them is to prove McLuhan’s point that the medium is the message, or perhaps it is a more Freudian thing.

Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire

Random Observations

• The history of aerospace companies in 1967 versus today. All predecessors of the current names. Although as with most things different men and different times. North American Rockwell, Lockheed, McDonnell, Grumman. I imagine the full names now but these were the complete names at the time
• This book came on my radar from Penn Jillette, saying something like PSS 705
• The descriptions of the capsules should be seen as well to understand the difference between the video we see now of the ISS versus what they had during the Apollo years.
• Artemis mission