While we hear much about the astronauts that walked on the Moon, there was a third crewmember on each Apollo mission that was critical to success: the Command Module Pilot, without whom none of the Apollo missions would have accomplished its goals.

Cli_ord R. McMurray

NASA

Mike Collins during a simulation inside the Command Module Columbia.

NASA

Minutes after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, CAPCOM Charlie Duke told Neil Armstrong, “Be advised there’s lots of smiling faces in this room and all over the world.”

“Well there are two of them up here,” Armstrong replied. Michael Collins, orbiting overhead, was smiling too as he keyed his microphone to say, “And don’t forget one in the Command Module.”

Unfortunately for Collins, the two-and-a-half second round trip time for a radio signal meant that a reply was coming in from Houston at the same time: “Roger. That was a beautiful job, you guys.”

“I was more than a little embarrassed to hear their message coming in as I was mouthing mine. It sounded like I was asking them not to forget to compliment me …instead of merely adding my smiling face to the list,” he wrote later.

Embarrassing miscommunication aside, Collins’ words could properly be taken as the legitimate complaint of every Command Module Pilot (CMP) who came before and after him in the Apollo program. There are library shelves full of books written by and about the Moonwalkers; only three CMPs—lunar astronauts who did not make the trip to the surface—have had biographies or autobiographies published about them. As Armstrong himself said, “The Command Module pilot, the second in command of an Apollo spacecraft, was the least understood and least appreciated crew member by the media and the general public.” Collins won’t be forgotten because he was a member of the first crew, but hardly anyone who’s not a certified space geek can name even one of the others. As one recent commentator put it, they were “the drummers in the Apollo rock band.”