Michael Collins (astronaut) At the end, Alan Shepard, the Chief of the Astronaut Office, asked the fourteen to rank their fellow astronauts in the order they would want to fly with them in space. Collins picked David Scott in the number one position. After this basic training, the third group were assigned specializations, with Collins receiving his first choice of pressure suits and extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks). His job was to monitor the development and act as a liaison between the Astronaut Office and contractors. He was bothered by the secretive planning of Ed White's EVA on Gemini 4, because
Chinese as a foreign language (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, goes that learning Chinese is Several major difficulties stand out: While English uses an alphabet, Chinese uses "hanzi", or Chinese characters, as its writing system. The "Kangxi dictionary" contains 47,035 characters (). However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure. The Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese (), promulgated in People's Republic of China, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters, while the Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese () lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500