Michael Collins (astronaut) Michael Collins (astronaut) Michael Collins (born October 31, 1930) (Major General, USAF, Retired) is an American former astronaut and test pilot. Selected as part of the third group of fourteen astronauts in 1963, he flew into space twice. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 10, in which he and Command Pilot John Young performed two rendezvous with different spacecraft and undertook two extra-vehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks). His second spaceflight was as the Command Module Pilot for Apollo 11. While he stayed in orbit around the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left in the Lunar Module to
Space rendezvous maneuvering thrusters to adjust its orbit to match that of its twin. The initial separation distances were in the range of , and slowly diverged to thousands of kilometers (over a thousand miles) over the course of the missions. In 1963 Buzz Aldrin submitted his doctoral thesis titled, " Line-Of-Sight Guidance Techniques For Manned Orbital Rendezvous." As a NASA astronaut, Aldrin worked to "translate complex orbital mechanics into relatively simple flight plans for my colleagues." The first attempt at rendezvous was made on June 3, 1965, when US astronaut Jim McDivitt tried to maneuver his Gemini 4 craft to meet