Michael Collins: “I could have been the last person to walk on the moon”
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins was part of the three-person crew that flew on mankind’s first mission to land on the moon, but he was the one who remained in orbit and never got to the lunar surface. In a talk at MIT yesterday as part of a class in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), Collins said that he probably could have had a chance to walk on the moon after all, had he chosen to remain at NASA after that epochal mission. “What I gave up probably was the opportunity to be the last person to walk on the moon,” Collins said in response to a question from the audience. Although there was no guarantee, he said, under the rotation system for crew selection at that time, he would likely have been named as commander of the Apollo 17 mission, which turned out to be the last to...