HN Books @HNBooksMonth

I cried today. I don't cry when strangers die, famous strangers particularly. But I cried today when I heard he had passed. He was a profound man who deserves a profound eulogy. That's beyond my capabilities, but I'd like to give it a good shake anyway.

I never had the good fortune of crossing paths with him except for the one time he liked one of my tweets (I joked that I'd been touched by celebrity - he intensely disliked celebrities). But I want to take a moment to describe how much Michael Collins meant to me.

His book, Carrying The Fire, https://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-Astronauts-Michael-Coll... is one of the reasons why I've decided to go into aerospace and take my shot at becoming an astronaut as an adult. He wrote parts of this book in orbit around the moon, and the rest when he came back to Earth. It is hard to describe the degree of tender self awareness that he possessed and the insight with which he wrote.

His book is one of the few books where the forwards are just as important as the book itself. Here's one he recently wrote,

> Could I be one of twelve of eighteen thousand? No way in hell.

It is rare for someone to acknowledge the locus at which the sum of their perspiration and preparation collided with the vagaries of fate. It is rarer still for them to say that had they been born later, or had the circumstances been any different, they might not have been the same. And it is far rarer for someone to talk about the mistakes of youth with this level of humor and care,

> Never mind the excuses, I was a mediocre student, more interested in athletics than academics. I was captain of the wrestling team, but even that was a bit tainted, as I was also a secret smoker. Stupid.

He had, as he admits in the forward, ADHD that went undiagnosed at the time. His teachers thought he was lazy, and he struggled in school. His grades were subpar, and at some point he woke up and he was thirty, writing,

> How had I managed to take so long to get so little done — no advanced degree, a piddling two thousand hours’ flying time, thirty years old, and nothing special in my record to offset these deficiencies?

A lot of books by people who have experienced what it is like to have history's eye upon them don't go into such details. And if they do, they tend to be written by others or they suffer from terminal self-aggrandizement. Collins' account doesn't suffer from this. It feels so raw and real, an inner exploration just as much an outer one.

It's as if we sent on Apollo 11 not just a preternaturally calm man with oodles of the Right Stuff (Neil Armstrong) and an orbital mechanics expert (Buzz Aldrin), but also a self-aware artist who recorded some of the most beautiful images of the trip and tried to capture the beauty of what he saw in front of him in verse. A man who can recite passages from Paradise Lost from heart and talks about the importance of bringing art and joy into the sciences. https://twitter.com/AstroMCollins/status/1313882376225734656

NASA chose well.

Here's one final quote from Carrying The Fire,

> Of course, Apollo was the god who carried the fiery sun across the sky in a chariot. But beyond that, how would you carry fire? Carefully, that's how, with lots of planning and at considerable risk. It is a delicate cargo, as valuable as moon rocks, and the carrier must always be on his toes lest it spill.

> I carried the fire for six years, and now I would like to tell you about it, simply and directly as a test pilot must, for the trip deserves the telling.

I lied. Here's another Michael Collins-ism,

> Farmers speak to farmers, students to students, business leaders to other business leaders, but this intramural talk serves mainly to mirror one's beliefs, to reinforce existing prejudices, to lock out opposing views

-

I'm holding a quasi-vigil for him on the aerospace club Small Steps & Giant Leaps in ClubHouse by reading Carrying the Fire personally or via the audiobook. You are welcome to join us and read a passage, a chapter, or whatever suits your fancy.

Here's the link, just come in the room and raise your hand, we'll pull you up :)

https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/PrDlo22D

-

Here's an excellent interview of him from 2019 talking about SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, and Mars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtIO06N3sw

⬐ MDVein

Very sad to hear, an inspiration to those who enjoy Space and the outer reaches of our atmosphere.

It is a pleasant surprise that this made it to the front-page of HN. Although it is late, I want to take a moment to write about how much Michael Collins has meant to me.

His book, Carrying The Fire, https://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-Astronauts-Michael-Coll... is one of the reasons why I've decided to go into aerospace and take my shot at becoming an astronaut as an adult. He wrote parts of this book in orbit around the moon, and the rest when he came back to Earth. It is hard to describe the degree of tender self awareness that he possessed and the insight with which he wrote.

His book is one of the few books where the forwards are just as important as the book itself. Here's one he recently wrote,

> Could I be one of twelve of eighteen thousand? No way in hell.

It is rare for someone to acknowledge the locus at which the sum of their perspiration and preparation collided with the vagaries of fate. It is rarer still for them to say that had they been born later, or had the circumstances been any different, they might not have been the same. And it is far rarer for someone to talk about the mistakes of youth with this level of humor and care,

> Never mind the excuses, I was a mediocre student, more interested in athletics than academics. I was captain of the wrestling team, but even that was a bit tainted, as I was also a secret smoker. Stupid.

He had, as he admits in the forward, ADHD that went undiagnosed at the time. His teachers thought he was lazy, and he struggled in school. His grades were subpar, and at some point he woke up and he was thirty, writing,

> How had I managed to take so long to get so little done — no advanced degree, a piddling two thousand hours’ flying time, thirty years old, and nothing special in my record to offset these deficiencies?

A lot of books by people who have experienced what it is like to have history's eye upon them don't go into such details. And if they do, they tend to be written by others or they suffer from terminal self-aggrandizement. Collins' account doesn't suffer from this. It feels so raw and real, an inner exploration just as much an outer one.

It's as if we sent on Apollo 11 not just a preternaturally calm man with oodles of the Right Stuff (Neil Armstrong) and a brilliant aerospace engineer (Buzz Aldrin), but also a self-aware artist who recorded some of the most beautiful images of the trip and tried to capture the beauty of what he saw in front of him in verse. A man who can recite passages from Paradise Lost from heart and talks about the importance of bringing art and joy into the sciences. https://twitter.com/AstroMCollins/status/1313882376225734656

NASA chose well.

Here's one final quote from Carrying The Fire,

> Of course, Apollo was the god who carried the fiery sun across the sky in a chariot. But beyond that, how would you carry fire? Carefully, that's how, with lots of planning and at considerable risk. It is a delicate cargo, as valuable as moon rocks, and the carrier must always be on his toes lest it spill.

> I carried the fire for six years, and now I would like to tell you about it, simply and directly as a test pilot must, for the trip deserves the telling.

.

On a related note (apologies for the shameless plug), I'm making my first side project, I want to build a place where I collect books like Carrying The Fire. I want to collect books that answer the question, "if you are an expert in field X, what book do you think someone should read by/about your field?" (at basic, intermediate, and advanced levels)

The idea is to make the kind of resource I wish existed. For example, Carrying The Fire was written in 1974 and is a first hand account of humanity's greatest adventure, and yet few have read it. Why? Simply because most folks never hear of it. You have to be obsessed with space to come across it, and yet reading his account should benefit everyone. It explores how someone with flaws can do something extraordinary, and all the ups and downs in between.

Another example is General Leslie Groves' Now It Can Be Told. https://www.amazon.com/Now-Can-Be-Told-Manhattan/dp/03068018... Groves was the manager behind the Manhattan Project and his book covers how he made The Bomb happen, organisationally. How do you create an organisation that can achieve the impossible? He lays out his lessons in project management, how he selected personnel etc, in digestable chunks. It should be on every founder's desk, and yet it's not, because it's arcane and you only really know about it if you are into military history and this very arcane form of atomic history.

I want to build a resource that helps cross-pollinate across fields. And I'm hoping that some of you would be kind enough to sign up to be our guinea pigs here, http://www.projectkarl.com

⬐ colomon

Ugh, just went to Amazon to check out the book, and discovered I bought the Kindle version last summer (maybe when the article originally came out) and then forgot to actually read it.

⬐ linschn

I've been obsessed with the idea of the best book in any field since I've seen Good Will Hunting where the hero says something along the lines of "you have a lot of books but it's never the right one".

I've since read a lot and sometimes I get a book that I feel is something anyone interested in the subject should read.

Skimming my shelves I recommebd:

The innovators dilemma

The idea factory

The design of everyday things

Shop class as soulcraft

A mathematicians lament.

Red plenty

I look forward to sseing what your project Karl is about

⬐ philips

Love the idea of the project and signed up myself.

⬐ redis_mlc

> why I've decided to go into aerospace and take my shot at becoming an astronaut

Never appealed to me - being an astronaut sounds like being a guinea pig.

Happy with my commercial pilot licence and study of aerodynamics.

⬐ veddox

I continue to be amazed by the moon landings. The pace of scientific & technical developments, the organisation & coordination of such a huge number of people, and the bravery & dedication of key individuals is just inspiring. Although I've read multiple books about NASA's history, I hadn't yet covered "Carrying the Fire" - thanks for the mini-review, it's now on my reading list ;-)

P.S. And your project sounds like a good idea, I'll check it out!

While I love 'The Right Stuff,' Tom Wolfe took many liberties with the truth, distorted events, and did not properly interview his subjects. Tom Wolfe himself admits that Alan Shepard hated it.[1] (Shepard accused him of never interviewing the astronauts)

For me, one of Wolfe's most troubling "creative interpretations" is his portrayal of Gus Grissom. He heavily implied that Grissom "screwed up" by taking a prevalent media theory and running with it because Grissom was already dead and couldn't tell his side of the story.

"""

Even after his death, perhaps because he was an easy target and could not defend himself, the public opinion of Gus was still questionable. In the book and the movie, "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe portrays Gus as "the goat among the astronauts, a hard-drinking, hard-living type who courts the favors of barmaids with gewgaws he promises to carry into space. He is also held up to the world as a man who screwed up, who panicked, blew the explosive hatch off his capsule and allowed it to sink to the ocean floor after reentry."

Wolfe described the scene at Edwards Air Force Base after Gus's Liberty Bell 7 flight as such: "And at Edwards . . . the True Brothers [test pilots who were not selected for the astronaut program]. . . well, my God, as you can imagine, they were . . . laughing! Naturally they couldn't say anything. But now - surely! - it was so obvious! Grissom had just screwed the pooch!"

Gus Grissom vs. the Media: Victim or Hero?

http://datamanos2.com/apollo1/grissom-media.html

"""

None of this ever happened. NASA's own internal investigations cleared his name and he later led an extremely successful Gemini mission and the ill fated Apollo 1. [2] He was the first member of the Astronaut Corps to fly in space twice and would have arguably led Apollo 11 had it not been for the fire. [3]

Tom Wolfe wanted to write a dramatic story about a group of people explicitly chosen for being preternaturally calm. So he resorted to creative devices (there are "composite characters" within the book) and fiction to spice things up.

If you'd like to get an accurate view of space history, then I'd suggest these books by astronauts and flight controllers.

Jim Lovell's 'Apollo 13' https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-13-James-Lovell/dp/0618619585 (which takes a very interesting systemic approach to the failure and views it from the perspective of the engineering and other ground crew as well as the astronauts)

Gene Kranz's 'Failure Is Not an Option' https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/dp...

Michael Collins' 'Carrying the Fire' https://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-Astronauts-Michael-Coll... (he wrote a part of this in orbit around the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin made their historic landing)

Eugene Cernan's 'The Last Man on the Moon' https://www.amazon.com/Last-Man-Moon-Astronaut-Americas/dp/0...

Shepard, Glenn, Cooper, Grissom, Schirra, Carpenter, and Slayton's 'We Seven' https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Astronauts-Themselves-Scott-Car... (written in 1962 by the astronauts themselves)

John Young's 'Forever Young' https://www.amazon.com/Forever-Young-Life-Adventure-Space/dp...

Together I find these books to be much better than any other compilation, because they were written by the people who were actually there. Some are technical. Some aren't. A few are even poetic. But together they represent a thorough look at the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

[1] "In other words they were like Everyman—except for Alan Shepard. He hated the whole thing, down to the paper it was printed on."

http://www.chipublib.org/interview-with-tom-wolfe/

[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/with-every-splashdown...

[3] According to Deke Slayton the "chief astronaut" who made flight selections, Grissom was on track to be a moonwalker. He was the key decision maker who pushed Armstrong forward as the first person on the moon.

http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/apollo/poss_moonwalkers.html

In general I agree with that, however there were many single points of failure in the Apollo program that resulted loss of crew and vehicle. In a conversational article such as this one I did not feel that the characterization was unwarranted. as I recall Michael Collins said as much in his book on the mission.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-An-Astronauts-Journeys/d...