Agent Palmer

Completing my read of Return to Earth by Buzz Aldrin and Wayne Warga also completed my own personal Apollo 11 trilogy of biographies/autobiographies of the three brave men who made that first trip.

What sets Aldrin’s book apart from the other two, is that while it tells his story it focuses more on feelings and his eventual spiral into, and battle with, depression. It overall is just as candid as Collin’s Carrying the Fire albeit more personal.

There is something uniquely wonderful about the autobiography of Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, and it is indeed the author Michael Collins.

Collins writes of his journeys into the astronaut corps and of his flights on Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 with such descriptive simplicity, that the book is both hard to put down and hard to continue without taking a moment to think about the story he has just told.

I have always been fascinated with Space. I’ve said this before when I wrote about building my LEGO Saturn V rocket, that I had wanted to grow up to be an aerospace engineer. It’s a fascination that has remained despite my educational leanings towards the liberal arts and away from the sciences.

So when I heard that coming this October there would be a movie release called “First Man” a biopic about Neil Armstrong, based on the authorized biography of the same name.

When I was a child, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you that I wanted to be an “aerospace engineer.” I didn’t want to go into space or to the moon, but I wanted to be a part of it. Be a part of the process of human exploration, and of course, work for NASA. Alas, back then, I was good at math and science, but somewhere along the way, I moved from those subjects to literature and the arts, and any form of engineering disappeared from my future.

Neil Armstrong died today at the age of 82. He was a legend and a national treasure. The man who took “one giant leap for mankind” is now, once again, among the stars. The twittersphere has blown up with memorial tweets but no one, that I’ve come across anyway, has asked this one question.

Why haven’t we gone back to the moon, since the Apollo program?