Hacker News Books

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

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

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

Does anyone know some good books that explore the space race? I've read Carrying the Fire(which was excellent), but it doesn't touch much on what the Soviets were doing.

His book Carrying the Fire is a great read. He's a rather good writer.

r.e. Michael Collins, his memoir 'Carrying the Fire' is a terrific read.

His sci-fi book "Encounter with Tiber" was pretty neat. Loved it, and it had me hooked the whole time.

Michael Collins "Carrying the fire" was also a very good book. Collins is a great writer with a great subject.

One of my favorite books is Michael Collins's "Carrying the Fire": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_the_Fire:_An_Astronau...

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.

> I strongly recommend reading Michael Collins's memoir Carrying the Fire

Can confirm. Read it a couple of months ago and decided it was the best of the Apollo-era biographies and autobiographies that I've read.

He wrote an excellent book Carrying The Fire that's widely considered to be the best written by any astronaut. It gives a broader overview than just the Apollo missions and covers the Gemini and Mercury programs that prepared for the moon shot.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys, by Michael Collins.

Read it originally 20 years ago. Re-read parts of it recently due to the anniversary, and it's still good.

Michael Collins' "Carrying the Fire" is by far the best of the astronaut memoirs (IMHO). Really well written!

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.

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.

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

I continue to be amazed by the moon landings. The pace of scientific & technical developments, the organisation & coordination of such a huge number of people, and the bravery & dedication of key individuals is just inspiring. Although I've read multiple books about NASA's history, I hadn't yet covered "Carrying the Fire" - thanks for the mini-review, it's now on my reading list ;-)

P.S. And your project sounds like a good idea, I'll check it out!

To anyone interested in early space flight and the Apollo missions, I strongly recommend reading Michael Collins's memoir Carrying the Fire. It is quite amazing all the training that the astronauts had to go through so they could manually perform various tasks and measurements, since the computing capacity was extremely limited.

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.”

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

I read predominantly fiction with some occasional non-fiction thrown in.
My two big recommendations from my 2020 reading are

(fiction): A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, 2020 Hugo Winner. It could be loosely described as a SF political thriller and contains some great characters, good ideas and genuine suspense. The future context of the story is based on the author's Ph.D research into the imperial tension between the intensely sophisticated Byzantine empire and its smaller neighbours in the 11th century.

(non-fiction): Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins. This is the autobiography of the astronaut who stayed in orbit around the Moon while Armstrong and Collins gained the kudos of the first lunar landing. I've read several accounts of the Apollo programme over the years, and this was by far and away the best written. Collin's account of his Gemini 10 mission is also gripping. This involved him spacewalking to an undocked Agena Target Vehicle while John Young was manually formation flying the Gemini spacecraft. Collins had to make sure he wasn't over any of the manoeuvring thrusters that Young might have needed to use to avoid a collision with the Target.

I'd also recommend reading "Carrying the Fire" by Michael Collins, it's probably my favourite book written by a Gemini/Apollo astronaut

NASA and the ability for a government program to be startup-like, as well as my impression that test pilots were selected only for bravado.

I'm reading Carrying The Fire, a book by the Gemini and Apollo astronaut Michael Collins. I was totally caught off-guard about how fast-paced, creative and generally entrepreneurial the early space program was. A common description of their working life was that people on a space mission put in insanely long hours because they were captivated by the long term vision and routinely made fun of other areas of the government where people were just punching the clock.

Even working with otherwise disagreeable folk was tolerated. Collins on learning that he'd have to work with John Young on Gemini 10:

"...besides, I would have flown by myself or with a kangaroo - I just wanted to fly. All that stuff about crew psychology compatibility is crap. Almost anyone can put up with almost anyone else for a clearly defined period of time in pursuit of a mutual object important to each."

Also, I thought test pilots were crazy people with a death wish, probably because of The Right Stuff. Turns out they practice a form of user-centered design and consider themselves as advocates for the end user (pilots in the field). It doesn't surprise me that the current field of HCI was born from the study of airplane cockpits. A joke in the book was about the true story of emergency instructions printed on the inside of a canopy - all the steps after the first one were completely unusable in the context of a real emergency because step #1 was to blast off the canopy.

“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.