But after that, physical fitness was up to the individual to maintain. The astronauts had an initial thorough exam before they were accepted into the program, testing their senses and capabilities. Physical fitness was not one of the NASA requirements, Collins said. They attended classes to learn everything about the spacecraft they would be flying and spent countless hours in simulators that replicated their missions to conquer every possible error. They rarely saw their families and flew from coast to coast, visiting facilities where parts of the spacecraft were being manufactured. Collins and his fellow astronauts worked hard, rising early and neglecting breaks on the weekends. The next year, I saw my mother and my father, and my father was slightly larger and more authoritarian but not too much more than my mother, and I passed.”Ĭollins was selected as part of the third class of astronauts in 1963. He didn’t like people making light of his card set. I say, ‘well, of course that’s eleven polar bears fornicating in a snowbank.’ And I could see the examiner’s eyes kind of tighten. ” ‘Here, so what do you see?’ they asked. “I leafed through a whole series of them, and then the last one was a blank sheet of paper, pure white, 8 by 10,” he said. He says there are 15 or 20 reasons why he might have flunked, but he likes to tell the story of the famed Rorschach inkblots mishap during his psychiatric exam. He “flunked out” the first time he applied to the space program.

The other 20% would rather fly and test new airplanes for the Air Force rather than getting “locked up in a capsule and shot off like a round of ammunition,” Collins said.Ĭollins, a fighter pilot for four years, graduated flight school at age 22. NASA and the idea of the Mercury and Gemini programs, which set up for the Apollo program, were attractive, and the space program seemed like a promotion. Collins and about 80% of his peers were “gung-ho,” he recalled.

No more heroes bosses astronaut