Lunar Caustic

By Robert Sherrod

CARRYING THE FIRE

by MICHAEL COLLINS

478 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $10.

One of the lessons that many former U.S. astronauts apparently learned during their training was how to land on their feet. A good number are now well-paid public relations vice presidents of business firms. Alan Shepard grew rich in real estate; John Glenn has a good chance of becoming U.S. Senator from Ohio next November; Richard Gordon is an executive with the New Orleans Saints football team; and Edgar Mitchell runs an outfit for the study of extrasensory perception.

Then there is Michael Collins, the man most likely to be forgotten as the pilot of the Apollo 11 mother ship that circled the moon while fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to take an extraterrestrial walk. Now a brigadier general (U.S. Air Force, ret.), Collins is director of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, which will soon house flying relics from the earliest balloons through Skylab.

Mike Collins was always different from other astronauts. Many harbored childhood memories of their fathers looking for work during the Depression, or of no money for the movies. Mike was born in Rome, where his father was U.S. military attache. By the time Mike was graduated from West Point in 1952 his father was a retired two-star general, his older brother was a colonel, and his uncle, J. Lawton ("Lightnin' Joe") Collins, was Army Chief of Staff.

In his self-effacing autobiography, Collins tells how he sidestepped Army nepotism by joining the Air Force. He became a hot-shot test pilot, was married, and eventually filtered through the rigorous screening process to find his way into the glamorous arms of NASA. This account of Collins' early training and the moon mission adds up to the best-written book yet by any of the astronauts.

Collins is both substantive and witty. He is also generous with his praise and fairly candid about his dislikes. Neil Armstrong, who now teaches engineering at the University of Cincinnati, gets the highest marks for his "great balance and perspective." Frank Borman, now a vice president at Eastern Airlines, "makes decisions faster than anyone I have ever met." Collins is awed by his Gemini 10 partner John Young, a country boy whose "aw shucks, 't aint nothing" demeanor masks a brilliant engineering mind.

Carrying the Fire displays less tolerance for some of the others, notably the Apollo 7 crew: "Wally [Schirra] was late every morning, never apologized, and never tried to catch up with the schedule but wasted instead another 45 minutes on guffaws, coffee and war stories . . . [Walt] Cunningham bitched constantly, at Wally and the world, and [Donn] Eisele served as a good-natured referee who didn't quite understand what was going on half the time."

Such passages are rare in this generally amiable book. Collins has a gift for clearly describing complicated machinery, and he also has an amusing imagination. He concludes that bras will not be necessary in space: "Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with 2,000 breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to every weightless movement . . . and I am the commander of the craft, and it is Saturday morning and time for inspection, naturally." .Robert Sherrod

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