Yet a higher call was calling, and we vowed we’d reach it soon
So we gave ourselves a decade to put fire on the moon
And Apollo told the world, we can  do it if we try —
There was One Small Step, and a fire in the sky!
(“Fire in the Sky“)

When I began actively looking to read more astronaut memoirs a few years ago, I noticed that Mike Collins’ Carrying the Fire was consistently one of the best-reviewed books out there. “That’s odd,” I thought. “Wasn’t he just the guy who circled the block for few day waiting for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to stop making history and get ready to come back home?” I decided to give it a try as part of a series of connected memoirs (reading about the same missions from three different astronauts), and — wow. I’ve read a few dozen astronaut memoirs and histories, and this ranks right up there with A Man on the Moon — dogging its footsteps like Buzz Aldrin dogged Neil Armstrong’s. Collins began his career in NASA (after two failed applications) with the Gemini program, and through various bits of happenstance, found himself on the Apollo 11 mission that would make history. Collins doesn’t bother with accounts of his early life, but instead beelines for the meat. What makes Carrying the Fire a standout memoir is Collins’ artful mix of humor, technical explanation, stirring description, and human interest stories. He’s by far the funniest astronaut I’ve read, and unlike many he had priorities other than glory in space — saying “No” to an offer that would have let him walk on the Moon in a later Apollo mission, because he felt he’d put his wife and kids through entirely enough hell already. I am not surprised this book has been re-issued numerous times: the version I read was the 50th anniversary edition.

Mike Collins struggled to make the astronaut grade, in part because he was delayed getting into the test pilot program, and in part because the competition was so fierce. When Collins was vying for a spot in the second astronaut pool (“The New Nine”), he immediately sized up Armstrong and declared that the Navy pilot would definitely fly. Like Elaine Collins a generation later, Collins had to thread a very delicate needle: racking up time flying jets to qualify for NASA, while growing closer and closer to the ever-shrinking age cutoff. Much of Carrying the Fire is what one would expect to find in an astronaut memoir: Collins explains how he came interested in flying, and then space; describes his struggles getting in, and then the training. Collins is a comic, though, and recounts his experiences being probed and prodded not with the serious earnestness of say, John Young, but like a guy at the bar telling a story to amuse his buddies. One of my favorite sections included his analysis of his fellow astronauts, those doomed to die like the Apollo 1 crew excepting. These are both funny and cutting: he describes Aldrin as a man so preoccupied with being mad about not being the first man to walk on the Moon that he forgets to be grateful for being the second. This is not a breezy, off-the-cuff memoir like Riding Rockets, though, because Collins is despite his many laughter-inducing comments, serious about what matters, like the spectre of death they all lived with and the unremitting hard work it took to make a mission a success. He attempts to explain to the reader the technical problems being encountered, and the wholly unprecedented, absolutely weird environments astronauts were working in. Imagine having to solve intellectual and physical problems in an environment that not a single part of humanity’s natural history ever prepared us for. Collins is extremely good at drawing the reader out of the chair and into the astronaut’s flight suit — both through his descriptions, whether they be of Edwards airbase or the sight of the Earth and its patina of an atmosphere, and through the details he provides. Collins often inserts tables and other text ‘illustrations’ directly into the body of the book, sometimes just to amuse the reader with the sheer arcane details NASA was interested in. Collins is simply a fun author, someone whose book I picked up with delight and anticipation every single time — and there’s no hint from him that he was disappointed to come so close to the Moon, and yet not touch its surface. Instead, he enjoyed the demands and challenges of Gemini/Apollo, and savored his experiences there — taking joy in what he had accomplished and seen, instead of moaning about what he had not.

The Apollo book to read is still Neil Chaikan’s A Man on the Moon, but as far as astronaut memoirs go? It’s Mike Collins by, and sorry Alan Shepard for borrowing your phrase, “miles and miles”.

Next up: Tom Stafford’s We Have Capture, and then a special theme week. Or, if I don’t finish in time, a special theme week with a random astronaut memoir in the middle.