CARRIERS OF APOLLO’S FIRE

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33917, 9 August 1975, Page 10

CARRIERS OF APOLLO’S FIRE

Carrying the Fire. By Michael Collins. W. H. Allen. 478 pp. Appendix. N.Z. price $11.70. I Reviewed by R.S.) This book may begin as an autobiography, it certainly does not end as such. It is more a biography of the 17th American to fly in space, and one of the crew of spacecraft 107 (alias Apollo 11) which first put a man on the moon. It is written by Michael Collins who mav or may not have something to do with N.A.S.A. Neil Armstrong. Soyuz. Mars or the “Six Million Dollar Man." The store of the writer’s early years _as a test pilot for the Air Force is interesting, well-written, humorous and critical It says quite a lot about Collins the test pilot. This Collins has just enough cynicism to make his judgments that much more credible. Collins describes the Original Seven astronauts as "Gordon Goodguys, steely resolve mixed with robust, muscular good humour. waiting crinkly-eyed for whatever ghastlv hazards might be in store for them ‘up there’.” As a test pilot he was asked

by a psychiatrist to describe a blank, pure white piece of paper. He replied that it was 19 polar bears fornicating in a snowbank. Astronaut Collins is another kettle of fish. In fact, a kettle of highlytrained but characterless fish might be a good description of the great can and its occupants which hurtled to the moon and back in July. 1969. As Collins progresses through his training build-up. his assignment to a back-up crew, his first flight aboard Gemini ID, more training, more back-up and finally Apollo 11, his character fades more and more from the screen.

"Carrying the Fire’’ becomes more and more a story of an enormous and expensive effort by many brilliant men and women, a story of EVA, CSM, CAPCOM. DOI, and' CMP Less and less it is the story of Michael Collins. As he is absorbed by N.A.S.A. he ceases to function as a personality. Collins complains at the end of his book that one of the prices paid for being an astronaut is to be asked a million times what it is like to be “up there.” He says in the preface that this was one reason for writing the book. Astronaut Collins is at pains to explain technicalities in a straightforward way, and succeeds. We do not really know at the end what it was all like for Michael Collins. Like other great explorers who have tried to come to grips with their achievements, Collins has failed to guide us into the mysterious persona of a numan being who has floated in the vacuum of space or bumped about in his tiny craft, weightless, and with no conception of up or down. Perhaps the tale could never be told, no matter how talented a writer the astronaut is. In the headlong rush towards the goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of this decade, N.A.S.A. produced fine controllers of its billion-dollar gadgetry; it left them with a little less soul. No doubt the astronauts would deny this vehemently, like Collins, who talks about the change in his perception of the earth that space travel has made. But a closing eulogydoes not belie the tenor of what has come before. Without realising it, Collins has lost a little but important element of naturalness. In its place

there is a disturbing trace of the emotionless sci-fi intelligence.

Whether Collins became a part of another Great American Dream which came true is difficult to estimate. In many ways his writing betrays an all too human detachment, but if he could have escaped from this he might have who knows what insights into spaceships and spacemen. “God, it’s nice to be back.” he says from the quarantine room. “Never more am I going flying in N.A.S.A.s sky. Gemini 10, Apollo 11 — between the two I must have had 20 lifetimes’ worth of opportunities to destroy myself; yet miraculously, here I sit, drinking my Martini and pleased as hell with myself.”

When it. is all over Collins chooses Martinis on the patio rather than more chicken soup in the command service module. His exit from N.A.S.A.’s scheme of things is as determined as his entry, and the same is true for many of the other astronauts. Neil Armstrong became an engineering- professor and loved it, while Collins, after a brief spell as a Washington bureaucrat, got a job looking after '‘fossils” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Buzz Aldrin, on the other hand, found it hard to pick up anywhere, suffered severe bouts of depression and spent periods in hospital. Perhaps it might have been better if Collins had suffered some post-operative crisis, and come back fighting. Then his book might have benefited from a more antagonistic approach to the incredible story of the first men on the Moon.