The Loneliest Guy in the world

Day 320 / 365

I saw this picture and it filled me with a lot of anxiety. It’s an astronaut freely floating in space, not connected to anything at all. How helpless would one be, if at that moment they just start drifting away in space! That is got to be the worst way to die.

All this thinking about being alone in space reminded me about a story I read a while back.

Everyone remembers the first guy to land on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Some will also remember the second guy who went there with him, Buzz Aldrin. But everyone forgets about the third person on that mission, Michael Collins. And that might be because Collins got to go all the way to the moon, but he didn’t get to land on it!

A lunar module dropped from Apollo 11 that took Buzz and Neil to the moon, and the rest of the mother ship kept orbiting the moon. To keep the ship in orbit, Collins was required to pilot it. At times when the ship went towards the dark side of the moon, he was several thousand kilometers away from Buzz and Neil, and about half a million km away from every other human being on earth. At that moment, Michael Collins was the most isolated person in history!

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — This is water