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    Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys
    Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys
    Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys
    Audiobook20 hours

    Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys

    Written by Michael Collins and Charles A. Lindbergh

    Narrated by David Colacci

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In Carrying the Fire, Michael Collins conveys, in a very personal way, the drama, beauty, and humor of the adventure of reaching the moon. He also traces his development from his first flight experiences in the air force, through his days as a test pilot, to his Apollo 11 spacewalk, presenting an evocative picture of the joys of flight as well as a new perspective on time, light, and movement from someone who has seen the fragile Earth from the other side of the moon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 30, 2017
    ISBN9781541472723
    Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys
    Author

    Michael Collins

    Michael Collins was born in Rome in 1930. After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy, he entered the newly independent Air Force, becoming a fighter pilot and experimental test pilot. He was one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in 1963. On his first mission, Gemini 10, he set a world altitude record and became the nation’s third spacewalker. His second flight was as command module pilot of the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July 1969. He is retired major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and has received numerous decorations and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Collier Trophy. He is now retired and lives in South Florida. Carrying the Fire is his memoir.

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    Reviews for Carrying the Fire

    4.5/5

    177 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very well done book with incredible detail. I’ve read so many of these books and always learn a little more. Rest in peace Mr. Collins, thank you for your service
    • 5/5
      Excellent all around. Collins provides an inside look into the early workings of the Apollo program, NASA, and manned space flight in general. His good humor and humble attitude make him a really likable person, and his style of storytelling is compelling. 10/10.
    • 3/5
      Good story of the lunar landing in 1969.
    • 5/5
      I have read and listened to many, many books on the space race, the Apollo missions, etc. this one is the best!!!!! Collins does such a wonderful and thorough job, all the while, keeping it incredibly interesting! I highly recommend it!
    • 4/5
      Of the three crewmen for Apollo 11, which is likely to have the most interesting story? The mission commander, first man to set foot on the moon and subsequently a household name? The co-pilot of the lunar module, cheated of glory by being only the second man to walk on the moon? Or the command module pilot, alone in orbit around the moon while the landing progressed, never setting foot on its surface?

      Charles Lindbergh believes the latter, and I am inclined to agree with him.

      Carrying the Fire is the story of Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, and his career as a test pilot and astronaut. The book does not suffer the fate of early drudgery that befalls most biography: Collins knows that his childhood and family life are of little interest to his readers, so he merely notes that they happened and moves on. This is the tale of his career, the journey of one man through planes and spacecraft and the agencies that build and manage them.

      The book is engagingly written and surprisingly introspective. I found the discussions of mission planning to be pretty interesting as well: the amount of forethought put into hazard prevention is astounding, even for one familiar with NASA's legacy of hazard and risk analysis. How do you determine the risks of an unknown yet undoubtedly hostile environment? You get a lot of smart people, do a lot of brainstorming, and be very, very careful.
    • 4/5
      Mike Collins' wrote his famous memoir himself. He is quite frank, including a list of his colleagues' personalities, and a bit of a kvetch, but he gives an exciting and in-depth account of his training, NASA politics, and both his Gemini and Apollo missions.
    • 5/5
      The first 'astronaut biography' I've read, and now I'm concerned that it sets the bar too high! Collins pays a lot of attention to the details, but still finds the time to talk about more emotional and personal experiences. He's not afraid to be self deprecating, which is always appreciated in any biography. The additional author's foreword found in the 2009 edition is a nice bit of text that you'll miss with an earlier edition.
    • 4/5
      Author Michael Collins was the command module pilot who orbited the Moon as Armstrong and Aldrin made their historic landing. This memoir covers Collins' early experiences in the NASA astronaut program, including his Gemini 10 flight, and his decision to leave the space program after the success of Apollo 11.As expected, it covers Collins' two spaceflight missions in detail, and provides copious information about the general training undergone by the astronaut corps, mentions a few internecine feuds in passing, and discusses the difficult transitions the author and other Apollo crewmen faced when returning from their missions.Collins does write well, but the overall pace of the book drags a bit, and the ending just sort of dribbles off into a series of "then I took this job" mentions.Definitely worth reading for those interested in the U.S. space program, but not necessarily the best book out there on the topic.
    • 4/5
      This book isn't an easy holiday read. However, if you have always wanted to know what the early astronauts did and what was the Apollo program in more depth, this is the book for you - and told from the human perspective of one of the key astronauts; Michael Collins.The difficulty the book faces in delivering the above is that to discuss how the early test pilots got into the then new field of being astronauts, and how the Mercury program fed into Gemini and then Apollo, and how Apollo 1 to Apollo 11 played out requires quite a bit of detail and a large degree of science as well.Overall this book is for those who are keen on the topic of space travel and they will get satisfaction from this book, as it will fill in some of the gaps in their knowledge, as well as allow them to re-live the experience of 1969. However, some effort will be required on the reader to achieve this outcome; this book follows the old axiom "you only get out what you put in".
    • 3/5
      Most popular stories about the lunar space race focus almost entirely on the astronauts, because it is a much easier story to tell. I find this frustrating since the astronauts are not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. In the case of an astronaut's memoir, though, the focus makes sense, and I really enjoyed learning about everything Collins was doing. Collins doesn't hold back too much, and is willing to say the bad as well as the good, and to name names. What I didn't like: The casual sexism and racism is disturbing. Collins's inability to communicate with his fellow astronauts and with the NASA organization gives me some understanding of Bell Hooks. Collins also isn't terribly self-reflective. He blames NASA's PR team for the public losing interest in lunar exploration, but can't consider that perhaps he deserves some of the blame, by treating the television broadcasts as jokes. Collins couldn't care less about lunar science. I also skipped the half-dozen introductions and prologues.
    • 5/5
      “There seem to be two moons now, the one I see in my back yard and the one I remember from up close. Intellectually, I know they are one and the same but emotionally they are separate entities. The small moon, the one I have known all my life, remains unchanged, except that I now know it is three days away.”Michael Collins’ memoir, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys is an incredibly fitting title. Here Mike takes us all the way from his test pilot days to his orbital time in Gemini 10 and then to his piloting of Apollo 11 where his job was to essentially drop the kids (Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong) off on the moon and pick them up later when they were through. Whether he’s writing about his test pilot days, his astronaut training days, or his days on Gemini 10 or Apollo 11, Collins doesn’t spare any details. Sometimes the details are funny (one man wrote a letter to the Apollo 11 crew to watch out for the giant ant hills on the moon – he could tell them where they were – for a fee); sometimes they are crude (how do astronauts do that in space anyway?) and sometimes they are incredibly heartbreaking such as the loss of three astronauts in the on-the-ground fire in Apollo 1. This book is only the second one I’ve read on the space program (the first one being Lost Moon) and I learned a lot from it. Training to be an astronaut was no easy thing. Up and coming astronauts had to spend 240 hours studying various things such as astronomy, aerodynamics, and flight mechanics. A lot of time was spent studying geology since the astronauts were expected to bring back a pretty sizeable haul of moon rocks. Since it was predicted that if a rocket was going to fall back to Earth it would crash near the equator, the astronauts-in-training had to complete a few days of learning how to survive in the desert and the jungle. Survival training included some classroom time plus a survival manual bible, “Air Force Manual 64-5’s, entitled Survival,” with its sage advice for the new jungle dweller: “ ‘Dangerous beasts – tigers, rhinoceros, elephants – are rarely seen and best left alone.’ I’ll say!” Not only do we get to fly shot-gun with Mike on his two space flights, he also takes us with him through all those hours upon hours in simulators where he would try to solve every possible scenario the engineers could throw at him. The questions of “what if?” “what do we do if?” and “how do we deal with THAT?” were inexhaustible and it required a gigantic team of all kinds of experts to brainstorm all the contingencies. Bad enough to have to spend so much time getting ready for the space flight itself, but there was PR to tend to as well. A few months before the Apollo 11 flight, an exhausted Collins went straight from simulator exercises to flying himself to some PR event . On the way back home he realizes he has become disoriented: “With a jolt I realized it had been a long day and I was making mistakes no alert air cadet would; this guy who couldn’t tell Washington from Baltimore was within a few months of navigating to the moon and back.” He did manage to successfully navigate back home and then eventually (thankfully!) from Earth to moon and back. He probably occupies a unqiue place in the universe as the one and only person to be separated, quite literally, from the entire world: “… I disappear behind the moon. … I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side.” I remarked to my son the other day that the closer I got to the end of this book – with the astronauts getting closer and closer to actually landing on the moon - the longer the book seemed to get. That’s when I realized I was having a little-kid-like “Are we there yet?” moment! As far as adventure goes, I don’t think you can beat going to the moon. Collins would disagree with me. In the new 1989 version there is a new preface written by Collins: "Today I look back on the moon not so much as a place, but a direction.” He talks at some length about his fascination with Mars and his belief that we need to explore it. “… I don’t think we should establish a time-table for Mars, although it seems to me a human landing could come in the first decade of the twenty-first century…." He also takes a moment to address the 1986 Challenger explosion, defend the aerospace industry, and laments the fact that the space program doesn’t enjoy the “spirit, the mood, the vitality of Apollo” that it once had. Edit | More
    • 5/5
      Michael Collins' 1974 memoir of his career as a test pilot and astronaut, including, of course, his historic journey aboard Apollo 11. I've read a zillion different accounts of this period in the American space program now, and somehow I never, ever get tired of them. Each one seems to offer some new perspective or to tell me a few things I didn't already know, and this book is emphatically no exception. Collins' account is very detailed, with day-by-day and sometimes even hour-by-hour descriptions of his activities on his Gemini and Apollo flights, including his own thoughts and reflections and opinions. Turns out, in addition to all his other accomplishments, he's also a pretty good writer. He manages to be very specific and clear about the more technical aspects of the job without either dumbing things down or making the readers' eyes glaze over with facts and figures and acronyms. (Well, except when he's deliberately demonstrating how this stuff can make your eyes glaze over, anyway!) He also possesses a terrific sense of humor, with lots of self-deprecating jokes and amusing asides and entertainingly forthright commentary making this a surprisingly fun read. And his description of his trip to the moon is downright thrilling. Mind you, I always find this particular subject thrilling, but there's nothing quite like a firsthand account. Although ironically, unlike the rest of the species, Collins didn't get to experience humanity's first steps on the moon as they happened; he was on the far side of the moon at the time, and out of communications range.I think I'd call this one a must-read for the true space enthusiast. Hell, it's unforgivable that it's taken me this long to get around to reading it, especially considering how long it's been sitting on my shelves.
    • 5/5
      Simply magnificent! As I've spent the last few days tearing through this engrossing book, I've been mindful of how I might be able to review it once I'd reached its end. Now that I have done so I find that I don't really know quite how to express what it is about Michael Collins' writing that moved me so much - except that I know this is most definitely one of the best memoirs I've ever read. It is truly a one-off, as the events it describes are so unique (most obviously the historic Apollo 11 mission) that they could only have been written by one of the members of 1960s NASA space program who was actually 'there'.Collins' writing is very laid back and as informal as it is informative. I rarely read books (for pleasure at least) with quite so much scientific content: rocket propulsion, trajectories, inter-planetary navigation, and so forth, but he puts these topics into words that I found no problem in understanding. Not that these subjects really dominate the narrative - his tale is told in a very personal and humourous style. For an astronaut (& fighter pilot for that matter!) Collins is incredibly humble and self-effacing - he repeatedly reminds the reader of how poor a mechanic he is and how lazy he can be...The early chapters retell his experiences as a USAF test pilot while in the background NASA's manned space program is underway. After some early setbacks he is eventually accepted into the astronaut staff at NASA in Houston, and begins the arduous training for the Gemini program. Amidst tales of geological field trips and survival training in inhospitable desert or jungle environments (in the event of any future re-entry going awry), and endless sickness inducing zero gravity dives, he gives a great sense to the day to day existence of an astronaut-in-waiting. As enjoyable as these pages are, the reader knows - as does the author of course - that it is all building up to the momentous day when he will finally sit at the 'tip of the pencil on the launch-pad' at Cape Kennedy on his way into space.The Gemini 10 mission he flies along with John Young is covered in every breathtaking detail, none more so than Collins' 2 EVAs (Extra Vehicular Activity - spacewalks to you and I). In the first, as he was taking star readings with his sextant whilst standing up in the hatch - head and shoulders out 'there' in space - he writes that he felt at that moment "like a Roman god riding the skies in his chariot". The 2nd EVA, where he has to leave the Gemini altogether and cross the void to reach the adjacent Agena craft (sent up previously specifically for this planned rendezvous), for the purposes of removing and replacing an experiment installed on its outside, is altogether more terrifying. He finds himself grappling with zero gravity while attempting to 'climb' aboard the rear end of a craft patently not designed for such an activity (there were no foot or handholds for his convenience) in bulky spacesuit complete with cumbersome gloves and yards of entangling umbilical line... There is no 'up' and there is no 'down' - talk about vertigo! All this while simultaneously reminding the Gemini pilot Young not to use whichever thruster may happen to be nearest to burning through either said umbilical lines or indeed Collins himself! It's edge of your seat stuff.The final third of this terrific book covers the famous Apollo 11 mission to the moon itself. The quirks of fate that led him to this moment are not lost on Collins as he writes of the medical problem which was discovered while he was due to be assigned to the Apollo 8 mission. His flight status of 'grounded' for several months inadvertently leads to his later inclusion on Apollo 11.I won't retell all that happens, but the moments when he is truly as alone as any human being has ever been - Charles Lindbergh's later congratulatory letter tells of relating to his experience more so than Armstrong's or Aldrin's - in lunar orbit while the landing module 'Eagle' is away on the Moon's surface are some truly gripping passages of tension. That said, the whole exciting tale is really page turning stuff.The final chapters contain Collins' thoughts on space travel in general (written in 1973) and where it might be headed. As well as his thoughts on humanity's attitudes to our 'blue and white planet', he poignantly expresses with one word above all how he sees Planet Earth now that he has seen the 'world in a window' - fragile.An excellent read and one which I heartily recommend to all.
    • 4/5
      This book is really two. The first part is a memoir of Collins participation in the space race, while the second part, under the title "epilog" is Collin's opinion of where humans are going with respect to space knowledge and exploration. I think the second part is the more interesting and important of the two. Because it was written bifore the International Space Station was built, it did not get the correct outcome of that program. That program degenerated into covering pottie repair with a total disinterest by the public of any exploration value or stepping stone function. Consequently that space station may not have contributed to Collin's conclusion of mankind being basically pioneering in nature and eventually expanding out of our earth cradle.In the first part of the book, there is good insight on the personalities of the astronauts and of the Nasa Gemini and Apollo management style.Having worked with professional astronomers, I feel the same as Collins that the general public has not gotten the message that the earth is not the center of the solar system, galaxy, or anything else and that the earth is round and whole so that pollution in one area truly degrades quality of life for all, not just locally where it is geneerated.Collin's epilog is worth reading by all. Since he has witnessed the big picture of the earth in its locale, his opinions speak from knowledge and experience.
    • 4/5
      This is the definitive astronaut account. If you read only one astronaut book, this is it. Collins is an engrossing author.