HackerNews Readings: Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys

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Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys

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jbperryonApr 28, 2021

Wow, I just finished reading Carrying the Fire three days ago. Good writer and a great ambassador for the space program.

hbravonApr 28, 2021

For the benefit of anyone who hasn't read it, his autobiography is called Carrying The Fire, and is excellent.

thestoicattackonApr 28, 2021

I'm glad his memoir, "Carrying the Fire", got mentioned. It's one of the best astronaut memoirs.

BrezaonMay 1, 2021

It's a truly amazing book. It's easy for authors to romanticize spaceflight or to write a dry technical manual. Carrying the Fire does an incredible job of splitting the difference between the two extremes.

jsrcoutonApr 28, 2021

Sad news. He was articulate and passionate, but very humble also. His book Carrying the Fire revived my interest in space as a 30-something adult who grew up dreaming of being an astronaut.

pjmorrisonApr 28, 2021

Huge fan. "Carrying the Fire" was one of the greatest finds in my (rural Florida, 1970's) high school library. I'd never heard anyone say "I bore easily", let alone someone as responsible as an astronaut, I was awed by the vulnerability, and encouraged that boring easily wasn't necessarily debilitating. A great book, a great man.

matt_jonApr 29, 2021

Carrying The Fire is my favourite astronaut memoir and I've read a few, it reads beautifully. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest.

mbaumanonApr 28, 2021

I've always thought the CSM commanders had the most incredible and challenging role of the three Apollo astronauts. They were undoubtedly the "most alone" humans ever — at least on a physical level. Every other hour they'd transit to the far side of the moon and would be 2200 miles (3600km) away from the nearest two humans and hundreds of thousands of miles/km away from everyone else who's ever lived. Not only that, they lost radio contact. The silence and solitude must have been wild.

For upwards of three days.

From the NYT obit:

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life,” [Collins] wrote in recreating his thoughts for his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.”

“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 only knows what on this side,” he added. “I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars — and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void.”

hcrisponApr 28, 2021

He spoke about this in the documentary film, In the Shadow of the Moon [0], "Certainly I didn't feel it as fear, I felt it as awareness, almost a feeling of exultation. I liked it! It was a good feeling." He mentioned the same thing in his book, Carrying the Fire (I saw that NPR is calling it "the best of the astronaut autobiographies", and having read it, I concur.)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMx2MA5bEtk

sp3000onApr 28, 2021

“How isolated, how lonely those two space supermen appeared! But they had each other for companionship; and through television, they were held in the thoughts of viewing millions of men and women. To be really isolated, to fully experience loneliness, you must be alone. From Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s spectacular movements, my mind shifted to Collins’s lunar orbiting. Relatively inactive and unwatched, he had time for contemplation, time to study both the nearby surface of the moon and the distant moonlike world. Here was human awareness floating through universal reaches, attached to our earth by such tenuous bonds as radio waves and star sights. A minor functional error would leave it floating forever in the space from which, ancestrally, it came.”

Charles Lindbergh's forward in Carrying the Fire.