Michael Collins. Astronaut Michael Collins was 38 years old at the time of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. After graduating from West Point he became an experimental flight test officer at the Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards Air Force Base, California, testing performance and stability and control characteristics of jet fighters. For NASA he participated in the 3-day Gemini X mission, testing spacecraft docking procedures and becoming the third person to perform a space-walk. During the Apollo 11 mission, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon, Collins piloted the command module 60 miles above the moon's surface. Asked in 1997 how he felt about having to stay aboard the command module while his crewmates walked on the moon, he said "It's one of the questions I get asked a million times, 'God, you got so close to the moon and you didn't land. Doesn't that really bug you?' It really does not. I honestly felt really privileged to be on Apollo 11, to have one of those three seats. "I mean, there were guys in the astronaut office who would have cut my throat ear to ear to have one of those three seats. I was very pleased to have one of those three. Did I have the best of the three? No. But was I pleased with the one I had? Yes! And I have no feelings of frustration or rancor or whatever. I'm very, very happy about the whole thing." Apollo 11 was his last spaceflight. He later became Director of the National Air & Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/collins-m.html http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap11ann/interviewspdf/collins97.pdf