On July 20, 1969, the collective im

On July 20, 1969, the collective imagination of the planet was captured by the grainy black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. On a family holiday in Bettystown, County Louth, my childish thoughts were focused not on the two indistinct figures beamed back from the planet's surface, but on the other guy; the one left behind in the spaceship circling above them, waiting in limbo for what must have seemed like an eternity for the safe return of his comrades.

Michael Collins, the astronaut in question, occupied a special place in my adolescent imagination because he had the same name as the charismatic Irish civil-war hero, later immortalised on celluloid in Neil Jordan's film. The other Michael Collins, though, missed out on the great symbolic moment, yet his role in the unfolding drama seemed to me the most heroic, certainly the most lonely, of all. "Collins moved through a continual succession of sun-drenched lunar day, soft earthlight, and unyielding blackness," writes Andrew Chaikin, in his extraordinarily detailed and evocative book about the Apollo missions, Man On The Moon. "For 48 minutes out of each orbit, from Loss of Signal to Acquisition of Signal, he knew a solitude unprecedented in human history."

Collins was alone in the Columbia spacecraft for 22 hours. In the event, he did not even get to hear the most famous words uttered in the 20th century. As Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface - "That's one small step for man..." then, that Shakespearian pause, "...one giant leap for mankind" - the Columbia had just slipped behind the far side of the moon and he had lost the moon-earth-moon link-up engineered by mission control for his benefit. By the time he reappeared, Armstrong and Aldrin were planting the American flag on the Sea of Tranquillity, but a technical fault kept him cut off. While an estimated 600 million people on planet earth watched and listened, transfixed, the man closest to those momentous events could, literally and symbolically, only imagine them.

Reading Chaikin's book brought home to me the full responsibility and risk of the Apollo adventures: Apollo 1 caught fire and its crew - Grissom, White and Chaffee - had perished barely two years before the successful moon landing. It was a tragedy that had been all but expunged from America's collective memory, but one that must have haunted the astronauts who followed in their footsteps. If disaster had struck Apollo 11 - say, if the Eagle, the landing craft, had malfunctioned during its take-off from the moon, or if it had later failed to dock with the Columbia craft - Collins would have had to do the unthinkable: leave his partners behind and journey back to earth alone. For the rest of his life, he would have had to carry an impossibly heavy burden: the loss of his friends and fellow adventurers, and the death of the greatest of all American dreams. It would have been a disaster with implications we can barely imagine.

Did he allow the unthinkable to cross his mind as he floated silently in space some 60 miles above the surface of the moon? Apparently not. Soon after the event, Collins published his diary of that time in limbo, fragments of which read like a work of almost metaphysical intensity, yet contain no traces of uncertainty regarding the precariousness of his mission: "I am alone, now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life," he wrote. "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 knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully - not as fear or loneliness - but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like."

That, in essence, was what Tom Wolfe would later call the Right Stuff: self-belief, certitude and - "I am it" - pure ego.

The photographer Steve Pyke grew up, like me, transfixed by America's great adventure in space. As the years passed and appreciation of that great adventure seemed to diminish in the collective consciousness, his curiosity about it - and the men who undertook it - grew. "It has," he says, "taken me 30 years to absorb what they did and to make sense of it, not just as a scientific achievement but as the last truly heroic human adventure. It was a singular moment when a few individuals carried the whole world's hopes and aspirations. I just wanted to meet these guys, as much as anything, because they were myth- makers, adventurers, pioneers. I think you can feel that off them, their sense of destiny, the sense that they were, and remain, part of an elect. It's a palpable energy - an aura, almost. They come into a room and the atmosphere changes. But there's also something else, something more elusive and almost sad. What they achieved was truly awe-inspiring, and, in a way, they have had to live in the shadow of that moment ever since. That's a heavy weight to carry."

Pyke never got to meet Collins, who declined to be photographed for personal reasons - he had just lost his son - nor Armstrong, who now fiercely protects his privacy and has retreated to a remote home in native rural Ohio, but he did photograph and talk to the other Apollo 11 astronaut, Aldrin, as well as 10 other men who had been in outer space. He asked each of them what space meant to them and, unsurprisingly, garnered some interesting answers.

"I was ordered to Washington DC in 1959 to listen to overtures about going into space in a capsule on top of a rocket," replied Wally Schirra, whose career spanned both the Gemini and Apollo missions. "I was not interested, and I lost interest completely when it was added that they would launch monkeys and chimpanzees first. Later, I realised that, as a fighter pilot, if I wanted to go higher, faster and farther, this was the way. I left earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth."

To Pyke's surprise, he found that many of the space pioneers had, like Yuri Gagarin before them, been treated shabbily by the government that was, simultaneously, holding them up as the ultimate exemplars of the American dream. "Armstrong was sent out on extraordinary meet-and-greet itineraries, doing maybe 15 interviews a day as well as speeches, but nobody really looked after him. He was booked into scuzzy hotels, often he didn't have time to eat all day."

If Armstrong took his destiny in hand and retreated voluntarily from the glare of celebrity, Buzz Aldrin had an altogether more difficult time: he struggled with both manic depression and alcoholism before finding a new role as, according to Chaikin, "a one-man think tank, designing everything from new launch vehicles to scenarios for returning to the moon". Charlie Duke, the tenth man to walk on the moon, went the other way and set up his own church in Texas. In all there have been six successful missions to the moon, and 12 men have walked on it.

"They all have extraordinary egos," says Pyke, "but that goes with the turf, I guess. Whatever, to me they are heroic men in the real sense of the word. They took extraordinary risks and what they did was, literally and metaphorically, out of this world. I've photographed enough celebrities to see first-hand how devalued and diminished the notion of heroism has become, but these guys were the real thing and they made me feel like a star-struck kid."

Pyke also photographed the Nasa back-up teams and, in the process, uncovered a plethora of old technical instruments - some were gathering dust in cupboards, but all have acquired an almost talismanic quality not because of their often extraordinary functions but because of where they have been. There is the Apollo 11 sample box, for transporting moon rock, the hammer that astronaut Al Bean used to chip those samples from lunar craters and ridges, and a strange, vice-like tool that turned out to be Tom Stafford's water dispenser.

Pyke also discovered that each astronaut was allowed to take into space a PPK - Personal Preference Kit - in which he could carry objects of his choice up to a certain weight. "Many of them brought cheap rings and medals, rolls of dimes, books of stamps, things they could give away to their friends and family when they returned: small things invested with huge meaning because they'd been to the moon and back."

Rusty Schweickart, known to his compatriots as "the hippy astronaut" because he preferred to listen to the Grateful Dead in space rather than the regulation country-and-western recordings, brought a collection of quotations by John and Robert Kennedy, the Dalai Lama, Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He secretly attached them to the inside of his spacesuit, and they were there with him when he walked out of Apollo 9 into space.

Schweickart also experienced something that no other astronaut, before or since, has: because of a technical hitch that occurred just as he stepped outside the craft, he had to wait for five minutes while it was corrected. Instead of working at his tasks quickly and intensely, as he had been trained to, he suddenly had breathing space, time to try and take in where he was, what he was doing. He held on to the rail of Apollo 9 and - for five long minutes - glided through the vastness and silence of space. Below him he could see America drift by, and even, after a while, make out southern California, where he lived. It was a life-changing moment, and, like the rest of them, Schweickart has, to some degree, lived in the shadow of that moment ever since.

In a whole other way, so have we. What strikes me, in retrospect, about the great lunar adventure is how quickly we - the human race - processed it and, more troublingly, lost interest in it. "The whole Apollo mission was born of a time of great idealism and optimism," says Pyke, "even though it was located within the political drama of the cold war. The country had a charismatic president, John F Kennedy, who voiced the dream,

Результаты (русский) 1:

20 июля 1969 года коллективное воображение планеты был захвачен зернистых черно-белых изображений Нейл Армстронг и Базз Олдрин, ходить по Луне. На семейном празднике в Беттистаун, графство Лаут, мои детские мысли были направлены не на две нечеткие фигуры, сиял от поверхности планеты, но на другой парень; тот оставил в космическом корабле, круживший над ними, ожидание в подвешенном состоянии, за что должны казалось, целую вечность для безопасного возвращения его товарищей.Michael Коллинз, астронавта в вопросе, занимал особое место в моем подростков воображение, потому что он же имя как харизматичный ирландский герой гражданской войны, позднее увековечена на целлулоид в фильме Нил Jordan. Другие Michael Коллинз, хотя, пропустили на большой символический момент, но его роль в разворачивается драма казалось мне самый героический, безусловно наиболее одиноко, всех. «Коллинз переехал через постоянное правопреемства залитые солнцем лунный день, мягких earthlight и непреклонный черноты,» пишет Андрей Чайкин, в книге чрезвычайно подробные и воспоминания о Аполлон миссий, человек на Луне. «48 минут из каждой орбите, от потери сигнала приобретения сигнал, он знал одиночество, беспрецедентной в истории человечества.»Collins was alone in the Columbia spacecraft for 22 hours. In the event, he did not even get to hear the most famous words uttered in the 20th century. As Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface - "That's one small step for man..." then, that Shakespearian pause, "...one giant leap for mankind" - the Columbia had just slipped behind the far side of the moon and he had lost the moon-earth-moon link-up engineered by mission control for his benefit. By the time he reappeared, Armstrong and Aldrin were planting the American flag on the Sea of Tranquillity, but a technical fault kept him cut off. While an estimated 600 million people on planet earth watched and listened, transfixed, the man closest to those momentous events could, literally and symbolically, only imagine them.Reading Chaikin's book brought home to me the full responsibility and risk of the Apollo adventures: Apollo 1 caught fire and its crew - Grissom, White and Chaffee - had perished barely two years before the successful moon landing. It was a tragedy that had been all but expunged from America's collective memory, but one that must have haunted the astronauts who followed in their footsteps. If disaster had struck Apollo 11 - say, if the Eagle, the landing craft, had malfunctioned during its take-off from the moon, or if it had later failed to dock with the Columbia craft - Collins would have had to do the unthinkable: leave his partners behind and journey back to earth alone. For the rest of his life, he would have had to carry an impossibly heavy burden: the loss of his friends and fellow adventurers, and the death of the greatest of all American dreams. It would have been a disaster with implications we can barely imagine.Did he allow the unthinkable to cross his mind as he floated silently in space some 60 miles above the surface of the moon? Apparently not. Soon after the event, Collins published his diary of that time in limbo, fragments of which read like a work of almost metaphysical intensity, yet contain no traces of uncertainty regarding the precariousness of his mission: "I am alone, now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life," he wrote. "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 knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully - not as fear or loneliness - but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like."That, in essence, was what Tom Wolfe would later call the Right Stuff: self-belief, certitude and - "I am it" - pure ego.The photographer Steve Pyke grew up, like me, transfixed by America's great adventure in space. As the years passed and appreciation of that great adventure seemed to diminish in the collective consciousness, his curiosity about it - and the men who undertook it - grew. "It has," he says, "taken me 30 years to absorb what they did and to make sense of it, not just as a scientific achievement but as the last truly heroic human adventure. It was a singular moment when a few individuals carried the whole world's hopes and aspirations. I just wanted to meet these guys, as much as anything, because they were myth- makers, adventurers, pioneers. I think you can feel that off them, their sense of destiny, the sense that they were, and remain, part of an elect. It's a palpable energy - an aura, almost. They come into a room and the atmosphere changes. But there's also something else, something more elusive and almost sad. What they achieved was truly awe-inspiring, and, in a way, they have had to live in the shadow of that moment ever since. That's a heavy weight to carry."Pyke never got to meet Collins, who declined to be photographed for personal reasons - he had just lost his son - nor Armstrong, who now fiercely protects his privacy and has retreated to a remote home in native rural Ohio, but he did photograph and talk to the other Apollo 11 astronaut, Aldrin, as well as 10 other men who had been in outer space. He asked each of them what space meant to them and, unsurprisingly, garnered some interesting answers.
"I was ordered to Washington DC in 1959 to listen to overtures about going into space in a capsule on top of a rocket," replied Wally Schirra, whose career spanned both the Gemini and Apollo missions. "I was not interested, and I lost interest completely when it was added that they would launch monkeys and chimpanzees first. Later, I realised that, as a fighter pilot, if I wanted to go higher, faster and farther, this was the way. I left earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth."

To Pyke's surprise, he found that many of the space pioneers had, like Yuri Gagarin before them, been treated shabbily by the government that was, simultaneously, holding them up as the ultimate exemplars of the American dream. "Armstrong was sent out on extraordinary meet-and-greet itineraries, doing maybe 15 interviews a day as well as speeches, but nobody really looked after him. He was booked into scuzzy hotels, often he didn't have time to eat all day."

If Armstrong took his destiny in hand and retreated voluntarily from the glare of celebrity, Buzz Aldrin had an altogether more difficult time: he struggled with both manic depression and alcoholism before finding a new role as, according to Chaikin, "a one-man think tank, designing everything from new launch vehicles to scenarios for returning to the moon". Charlie Duke, the tenth man to walk on the moon, went the other way and set up his own church in Texas. In all there have been six successful missions to the moon, and 12 men have walked on it.

"They all have extraordinary egos," says Pyke, "but that goes with the turf, I guess. Whatever, to me they are heroic men in the real sense of the word. They took extraordinary risks and what they did was, literally and metaphorically, out of this world. I've photographed enough celebrities to see first-hand how devalued and diminished the notion of heroism has become, but these guys were the real thing and they made me feel like a star-struck kid."

Pyke also photographed the Nasa back-up teams and, in the process, uncovered a plethora of old technical instruments - some were gathering dust in cupboards, but all have acquired an almost talismanic quality not because of their often extraordinary functions but because of where they have been. There is the Apollo 11 sample box, for transporting moon rock, the hammer that astronaut Al Bean used to chip those samples from lunar craters and ridges, and a strange, vice-like tool that turned out to be Tom Stafford's water dispenser.

Pyke also discovered that each astronaut was allowed to take into space a PPK - Personal Preference Kit - in which he could carry objects of his choice up to a certain weight. "Many of them brought cheap rings and medals, rolls of dimes, books of stamps, things they could give away to their friends and family when they returned: small things invested with huge meaning because they'd been to the moon and back."

Rusty Schweickart, known to his compatriots as "the hippy astronaut" because he preferred to listen to the Grateful Dead in space rather than the regulation country-and-western recordings, brought a collection of quotations by John and Robert Kennedy, the Dalai Lama, Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He secretly attached them to the inside of his spacesuit, and they were there with him when he walked out of Apollo 9 into space.

Schweickart also experienced something that no other astronaut, before or since, has: because of a technical hitch that occurred just as he stepped outside the craft, he had to wait for five minutes while it was corrected. Instead of working at his tasks quickly and intensely, as he had been trained to, he suddenly had breathing space, time to try and take in where he was, what he was doing. He held on to the rail of Apollo 9 and - for five long minutes - glided through the vastness and silence of space. Below him he could see America drift by, and even, after a while, make out southern California, where he lived. It was a life-changing moment, and, like the rest of them, Schweickart has, to some degree, lived in the shadow of that moment ever since.

In a whole other way, so have we. What strikes me, in retrospect, about the great lunar adventure is how quickly we - the human race - processed it and, more troublingly, lost interest in it. "The whole Apollo mission was born of a time of great idealism and optimism," says Pyke, "even though it was located within the political drama of the cold war. The country had a charismatic president, John F Kennedy, who voiced the dream,

Результаты (русский) 3:

НА 20 Июль 1969 г. в коллективное сознание планеты был захвачен зернистость изображения черно-белые изображения Нил Армстронг и Базз Олдрин на луне. По отдыхающим в пожилая пара, графство Лаут мой значит мысли были направлены не на двух нечеткое цифры балками назад от поверхности планеты, но, с другой стороны помощника по обустройству цифрового дома;