Michael Collins died on April 28th

THE MOON that filled the window of the spacecraft Columbia was not one Michael Collins had ever seen before. It was absolutely three-dimensional, its belly bulging out towards him. Cascading sunlight formed a halo round it. The lighter parts were a lot lighter than usual, the jagged mountains darker. It was electrifying. Then the feeling passed. “Hello Moon!” he quipped. “How’s the old backside?”

This was the closest he had come, as the Apollo 11 crew on July 19th 1969 scouted out their best landing place. But he knew all about the Moon: dry, lifeless, rough as a corncob. Sometimes it looked like a sun-seared peach pit, sometimes like smallpox. What it never looked was interesting. He would certainly much rather have flown off to Mars.

It was therefore no hardship, when his colleagues Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the lunar module Eagle down to the surface and clumped about on it, for him to stay for 27 hours in orbit in Columbia. Someone had to get them home. Besides, he loved Columbia, finest of ships, commodious and a friend. It pained him to think of Neil and Buzz trailing their grimy moon-goo into it. On his previous spaceflight, the Gemini 10 mission with John Young in 1966 to practise manoeuvering in Earth orbit, the two of them had squashed into a cabin the size of the front seat of a Volkswagen. By contrast Columbia almost reminded him, if you took the centre couch out, of Washington National Cathedral. When he later became director of the new National Air and Space Museum, planning and completing it on time and under budget, she had a place of honour, right by Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis.

Ensconced in Columbia he could dine in splendour on tubes of his favourite cream-of-chicken soup, drink fairly hot coffee, listen to music and crank up the thermostat to 76 degrees. For 48 minutes in each of 14 orbits, as he passed the Moon’s meteor-battered backside, it was a joy to get Mission Control to shut up for a while. So when the press called him the loneliest man in history, or at least since Adam, 65 miles above his comrades, 250,000 miles from home, that was ridiculous. Occasionally forgotten, perhaps.

In any case he had already had his own extra-vehicular adventure on the Gemini 10 mission, going out to retrieve a meteorite-collector from a dead Agena rocket, gliding across the night sky with perfect and stately grace, like a god. It didn’t matter that, after Apollo 11, people struggled to remember his name. To be third man then was fine. Together they had done what President John Kennedy had told them in 1961: put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and (implied) before those Russians did.

He was at Edwards Air Force Base in California when that challenge came down, testing fighter planes over the Mojave desert. Though some at Edwards scorned the thought of being locked in a can and fired around the world like ammunition, he burned to get into the astronaut programme. He dreamed of circling Earth in 90 neat minutes, like John Glenn; he hungered to explore the realm where his childhood hero Buck Rogers had roared around in his space rocket, tackling the Tiger Men from Mars.

All he needed was a lot of luck. By his own lights he was nothing special, though OK if you were looking for a handball game. As a student he was easily bored, especially when he had to process reams of flight data by hand into reports, or when, during astronaut training, he had to endure mind-numbing lectures on geology. Mathematical calculations destroyed the wonder of things; he would rather read “Paradise Lost”. By the age of 35 he was ready for the Gemini launch, but just as well it came no sooner.

He would now pit his little pink body against the hard vacuum of space, with nothing between them but a thin shell of metal or a pressurised suit. The whole business of going there, each manoeuvre leading to the next and each needing to be perfect, was like a long fragile daisy chain looping from Earth and back. If one link failed, all the rest was useless. Rather than be a weak point, as he worried he might be, he was now rigorously precise. Before Gemini 10 he filled a notebook with 138 potential problems, crossing each off as it was solved. Alone on Columbia during the Moon mission, he kept a packet of 18 different rescue plans tied round his neck, some so outlandish that they had never practised them.

His mission first commandment was simple: Thou shalt not screw up. Gemini 10 had been a practice run for Apollo, a local thing, but now the world’s eyes were on the Moon and on them. The commemorative stamps were already printed, the medals struck; he had sketched the patch-image himself, an American bald eagle with olive branches in its claws. Columbia carried a plaque to be left on the Moon, “We came in peace for all mankind”. The weight of expectation could not have been heavier.

Yet it came from a planet that seemed to weigh nothing at all. If he stretched out his arm to the window of Columbia, Earth was covered by his thumbnail. It floated in a black void, blue with seas, white with clouds, a tiny gem sparkling and shining. The word that kept surprising him was “fragile”. He had known Earth all his life as solid, heavy, terrifyingly hard as he fell towards it once when his F-86 was on fire. Now he wanted to take care of it. He wished its bickering politicians could see it from that distance. What would their arguments matter then?

Ever since some gruesome dental work in childhood, he had been able to detach his mind from his body when he needed to. At the dentist’s, he hovered near the ceiling. As a test pilot, he found secret spaces in cumulus clouds. In later life, if he needed solace, he would relive what he had seen from Columbia. That was his last space trip; being an astronaut took him away from family too much. He liked to recall how the Moon had looked close-to, shockingly spherical, and compared it with the shining dinner-plate he saw from his paddleboat when he was out night-fishing. He did not look often, though; been there, done that. It was the beauty of Earth he most remembered, and now campaigned to save. That first. Then on to Mars. ■