 Welcome to this edition of the Astronauts, I'm Lynn Bondrant. During the next half hour, we talk with former astronaut Michael Collins, who was on the first-man mission to land on the Moon. That mission is called Apollo 11, and it culminated in one of the most significant events in known history. His two companions, Astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Buzz Aldrin, were the first two human beings to walk on the Moon's surface. The mission took place from July 16 to 24, 1969. It lasted 195 hours, 18 minutes and 35 seconds. As called for by the mission plan, Collins did not descend to the Moon's surface, but remained in lunar orbit with the command module. Before we go to our interview with Michael Collins, let's see part of a 1969 film documenting that historic flight. The film is called, Eagle Has Landed, The Flight of Apollo 11. Other astronauts had made this journey to the launch pad, but never with such anticipation. 9.32 a.m., July 16. Three hours later, the Apollo command module moves forward to extract the lunar module from the third stage of the launch vehicle. Both are moving at more than 17,000 miles an hour. Dark together, they will sail a quarter million miles across the Sea of Space and into orbit around the Earth's nearest neighbor. Stand if you are, Doc. During the three-day journey to the Moon, the astronauts kept busy. Checklists, navigation and observation, housekeeping. They must work in a weightless environment, keeping their spacecraft and themselves in good condition. Data must be collected and reported. Experiments must be performed, including photography, both inside and outside the spacecraft. Because of the film speed, these actions appear faster than they actually were. July 19. Apollo 11 slows down and goes into orbit around the Moon. The bright blue planet of Earth now lies 238,000 miles beyond the lunar horizon. Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin, now in the lunar module, separate from the command module. Astronaut Collins remains behind. Preparation for the lunar module descent to the Moon now begins. The command module assumes the new name, Columbia. The lunar module will be called the Eagle. From Columbia, Michael Collins' camera sees bright rays of the sun reflecting patterns of color from the surface of the Eagle. In this strange metallic bird, rides the ancient and endless dream of all mankind. The command pilot can see detail which his camera cannot record. The four landing pads of the lunar module are fully extended and locked in place. The Eagle is poised and prepared for its descent to the lunar surface. Moon landing craft rocket engine fires to slow it down and to place it on the pathway to the landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. There is tension and caution as the Eagle flies lower. Warning lights blink on as the computer tries to keep up with the demand for controlled data. But the status remains, go. It's looking good, over. Roger, copy. Eagle Houston, after you're around. Angle, S-band pitch, minus nine, y'all, plus one eight. Rocket, you're a go to continue power descent. You're a go to continue power descent. Altitude now 21,000 feet. You're looking very good. Velocity down now to 1,200 feet per second. You're looking great there, Eagle. There's a reading on the 1202 program alarm. Roger, we got you. We're going at alarm. Good radar data. We're now in the approach phase. Everything looking good. Altitude 4200. Houston, you're a go for landing, over. I turn it down. Go for landing. 3,000 feet. Out of alarm. Altitude 1,600. 1,400 feet. Still looking very good. 7,000 feet, 21 down. 33 degrees. 100 feet, down to 19. 1201. 1201. Rocket, 1201, alarm. We're a go, same type. We're a go. Altitude, velocity light. 3,500 down. 220 feet. 15 forward. We're coming down. 9,300 feet. 4,500 down. 5,500 down. 60 seconds. Lights on. Quick. Down to 1,500. 20 feet down to 1,500. We can up some dust. 4 forward. 4 forward. Dripped into the right level. Nice. On back right. Okay. Engine stop. We copy you down, Eagle. Tanguality base here. The Eagle has landed. Through the window of the Eagle, Armstrong and Aldrin see what no human eyes have ever seen before. Their spacecraft casts a long shadow across the undisturbed dust of centuries. Seven hours after landing, after careful preparations for later ascent were completed, Armstrong opens the Eagle hatch and begins his climb down to the surface. The first footsteps on this strange new world must be taken cautiously. The moon has only one sixth the gravity of Earth. The nature of its surface was still unknown. I'm going to step off the lamp now. Now that we've seen some of the historic film of the Apollo 11 mission, we're almost ready to go to the interview I had with Michael Collins following the publication of his second book, Lift Off. But first, here's a little background on Collins. Michael Collins is a retired major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He was born October 31, 1930 in Rome, Italy. He earned a bachelor's science from U.S. Military Academy. Besides Apollo 11, he flew on the Gemini-10 Earth Orbital Mission, which was preparatory for Apollo missions. Collins walked in space during the Gemini-10 mission for one hour and 30 minutes. Astronaut John Young flew with him on that mission, which lasted from July 18 to July 21, 1966. Now let's go to my interview with Collins. When I asked him what he was trying to accomplish with his latest book, Lift Off. Well, I think people have very short memories, and I thought it might be interesting to go back 20 years or so, 19 years. It's been already since the first lunar landing, but to go back to the time of John F. Kennedy when he first started Project Apollo by saying he wanted to send the man to the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade, the decade being the 1960s. I thought it would be kind of nice to put down in sequential order some of the preparatory steps, Project Mercury, Project Gemini, Project Apollo, and to talk a little bit about those machines and how they worked, but also to talk about the people who put them together, the people who flew them, and then just to keep that going, we went through Skylab, the shuttle, an examination of where NASA is today, and then some possibilities for the future. So that's fundamentally what the book's about. Mike, looking back to the days of the Gemini and the Apollo programs to today's flight of the shuttle, what do you see as some differences as related to astronaut training? I think the shuttle is more complicated by far than the early machines were. The Apollo command module, I thought, was a real handful. To me, it was sort of like painting the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time I got to the end of it, there was something I'd forgotten at the beginning, and for me it was a constant process of education, of learning, and yet they tell me the shuttle is probably the equivalent of four command modules in complexity, so that's the main difference. What about public support, comparing it in the past during Gemini, Apollo, and today it seems as though in the past there was a lot more public support for going to the moon than even there is today for, say, putting a space station in orbit? Well, I think there are some fundamental differences. One is that President Kennedy got very personally involved. Capitol Hill in those days was more apt to go along with White House programs than they are today, without the enthusiastic support of the Congress, and I think the people. The difficulty with the space station, I believe, is that it's to be a research facility. It's to find out answers to difficult questions, and yet a lot of the politicians and budgeteers and bureaucrats want NASA to list exactly what the answers to those questions are before they fly this research laboratory. That's simply not possible. That's the whole point in going, is to have a research facility and to learn as much as we possibly can. I mean, we never would have had the invention of penicillin, for example, if the people doing the work had to take that NASA-like approach and say in 20 pages why they were studying this particular mold or fungus and what the spin-offs of it might possibly be. So as a nation, they were really struggling to even identify a space policy. You know, you look at the shuttle space policy and many people consider it a real disaster. What do you think we have to do to turn things around? There is a fairly recent space policy issued by the Reagan White House, which makes a good deal of sense, and it includes sending people out into the universe, but that policy has to be backed up with a high priority by the President himself, by his staff, by the leaders in Congress. And I don't think that's happened because NASA is still appropriated less than 1% of the federal budget and I think they need a little bit more to get an aggressive, good long-range program going. Mike, thinking back over the past 30 years that NASA has been around, what do you think have been NASA's five greatest accomplishments or achievements? I've always thought that the first lunar landing by the end of the decade was probably what NASA did best. I think in a way, though, I think Apollo 8 was a more fundamentally important flight than Apollo 11. Apollo 8, you recall, was the one that first saw men breaking away, breaking the bonds of gravity and reaching escape velocity. Another achievement that people forget is a little thing called Pioneer 10. Pioneer 10 is the first manufactured first object made by humans to leave our solar system. It's gone out past the orbit of Pluto and has headed out for all times for infinity out into the universe. I think the unmanned landing on Mars by the two Viking landers I think that was a very important achievement. So I guess I might say this is a short and quick list, but Apollo is 8 and 11, Pioneer 10 and Viking. And then the fifth one I'm going to put in the future, and I'm going to say that's the Hubble Space Telescope. Mike, now that you've thought about NASA's five major accomplishments, do you think that Mars should be NASA's next major initiative or endeavor? Yes, I really do. I think Mars would be so important and so long range of goal that it would pull in its wake a lot of things that NASA is trying to do today, but not having much success with. For example, if you want to return to the moon, I think probably a better justification for it is that it'd be a way station on the way to Mars. I'm not saying that you have to have a colony on the moon or that you must return to the moon in order to reach Mars. You don't, but if Mars were your goal, you might very well discover that the most practical way to get there would be to build a lunar colony first. Clearly, if Mars were your goal, you'd need a space station. The purposes to which that space station would be put would be much more clearly defined and I think NASA would have an easier time justifying and obtaining the funds for a space station as a precursor to Mars, especially from the human factor's physiological point of view. I think a lot of things would pull in in the wake of a Mars initiative. Mike, do you think that the enthusiasm and the incitement on planet Earth will be as great for a mission to Mars as it was for the Apollo missions to the moon? I think so. I think Mars is a lot more interesting place than the moon, although it is certainly true that the Viking results were disappointing in that they didn't find any life on Mars and no little green men. But the possibility exists that there used to be life on Mars and I think it would be fascinating to go digging the surface looking for fossils and studying the planet from the surface to try to determine why you have these two almost twin planets, Earth and Mars, and why they turned out so differently. Why the water, the one-time dug deep channels in the surface of Mars? Why did that dry up and blow away? Why did the Martian atmosphere become so thin? Why did they dissipate? What can we learn about our own planet from studying this one that's had such a different history? Do you think that the mission to Mars should be international in scope? That would certainly be nice. It complicates an already complicated task but I think it's worth a try and I think we ought to try to put together not just a U.S.-Soviet joint venture but one that includes a lot of other countries as well, the Japanese, the Europeans. Let anyone who can contribute technology and money throw it into the pot and do it in terms of humankind leaving this planet and establishing a settlement on Mars rather than anyone nation doing it. Thinking back at the time of the Apollo missions there were very few nations involved in space exploration and currently there are over a hundred. What would be the differences or the implications or influences versus many more people on a global scale involved in space exploration versus just a couple? Well, of course, the more countries that are involved I suppose the more popular, the greater support such a voyage would enjoy. The negative side of it is it makes it very difficult. It's difficult enough, I remember from Project Apollo to get two or three American companies all working together harmoniously. Never mind people who are divided by an ocean and different languages, different mores and cultures, even a different system for weights and measures. One of my favorite quotes in your book is these are not ejection seats but thrones facing out on the universe and we are wealthier than kings. By going into orbit, boards say a Gemini spacecraft or around the moon or to the moon in the Apollo spacecraft does it really change one's perspective of themselves and of the planet Earth? I think certainly to go as far away as the moon and look back on the Earth certainly does affect your perspective. The Apollo command module had five windows in it and when you're a quarter of a million miles away from Earth and you look out the window to find it it's very common to be no Earth in any one of the five. The Earth is down under you over your shoulder somewhere else. So that's a strange sensation to have to maneuver around even to find your home. And then when you see it tiny as your thumbnail held out in front of your arm's length that sort of gets your attention. A beautiful sight, tiny, pristine, blue and white a very fragile looking object shining like a beautiful little headlight out there in the black velvet of space. It does change your perspective. It makes you think that we have to take better care of this little fragile entity because it is fragile. And it also leads one in the direction of thinking about problems globally. Thinking back on your own career as a Gemini and a Apollo astronaut I think you had a chance to take a couple of EVAs. Spacewalks, yes. Could you describe that and was that perhaps in terms of the astronauts one of the scariest things that they have to do? It wasn't, it was one of the most fun things that an astronaut gets to do. It wasn't really scary but it was, it's like being cooped up inside a bath house, let's say and then suddenly being freed and allowed to go up and do a double back somersault off the high board. It was sort of that feeling of release of freedom of getting out of a confined space and the whole world at your feet to being able to see in all directions without confining spacecraft windows. It was a wonderful sense of liberation of freedom of floating of being one with the whole universe. And today using the MMU versus an umbilical cord, I know it gives much more freedom but it takes a different kind of training, does it not? Yes, the astronaut maneuvering unit is a miniature spacecraft in itself and it's a wonderful gadget. It's flown like a spacecraft. You have each hand with its assigned task to either turn you this way or that way up or down or to move you backwards and forwards and so the people who have, and I've never flown with it but the people who have clearly really are enjoying themselves and have a lot more control over where they go and what they do than you do dangling out on the end of an umbilical cord. One last question. If you had to give some words of wisdom to young people about the future and their part in space exploration what might you encourage them or how? Well I think whatever their field whether it be space or some other field I think to try to be the best in that field to really strive for excellence to I think that gives people a feeling of confidence and a feeling of well-being to know that they've put their everything into something and they're the best they can be at it. Certainly what's true I think is the space program and I think the space program will always be an area right on the edge of our knowledge, on the edge of our technology, on the frontier of physically and mentally of the things we do and to me it would be a fascinating area for young people to become involved with. Certainly as we get into the 21st century we're going to see some remarkable advances in our space technology and it would be a good career to be part of that. The interview you just saw with former astronaut Michael Collins was recorded earlier when he was in Cleveland and in future programs we will see and visit with other astronauts. Until then, this is Lynn Bonderant saying goodbye from the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.