The third man on the mission never landed
While ARMSTRONG and ALDRIN were on the surface, Michael COLLINS flew the command module alone. Every orbit took him behind the Moon, and for about forty-eight minutes of each one the bulk of it cut him off from every other human being alive — no radio, no contact, nothing. He did fourteen of those orbits.
The press made much of the loneliest man in history. Collins consistently said that was wrong: he had coffee, music and a job to do, and he described feeling awareness and satisfaction rather than fear. He also knew he had no way of rescuing the other two if the ascent engine failed, and had rehearsed the flight home alone. He is the one who took the photograph of the lunar module returning with the Earth behind it — a picture containing every living person except the man holding the camera.
A textile worker went to space in 1963
Valentina TERESHKOVA was working in a mill and parachuting as a hobby when the Soviet programme recruited her, and the hobby was the point: early Vostok crews ejected from the capsule and came down separately under their own canopy, so jumping was a job requirement. She had no background as a pilot or engineer.
She flew solo for three days in June 1963, orbiting more times than every American astronaut up to that date combined. Then nothing: no woman flew again for nineteen years, until Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982 and Sally RIDE in 1983. Ride's own selection came with press questions about whether the flight would affect her reproductive organs and whether she wept when things went wrong.
The spacewalk that nearly ended badly
Alexei LEONOV made the first spacewalk in March 1965 and came very close to not getting back in. With nothing outside pushing against it, his suit inflated until he could not bend his knees or reach the camera switch, and the airlock he had to re-enter was suddenly too narrow for him.
He bled air out of the suit by hand, below the pressure the designers considered safe, risking the bends, and forced himself in head first — then had to turn around in a tube barely wider than he was. He told nobody for years. Two years later Vladimir KOMAROV died when the parachute of Soyuz 1 failed to open, the first person to be killed during a spaceflight. The early days of this were substantially more dangerous than the newsreels implied.
Who else has been up there
Yuri GAGARIN got there first in April 1961 and never flew in space again — too valuable to risk. Alan SHEPARD followed weeks later, John GLENN orbited in 1962 and went back up at seventy-seven. Jim LOVELL commanded Apollo 13 home without a landing; Gene CERNAN was the last person to walk on the Moon in 1972, and nobody has been since. Harrison SCHMITT, on the same mission, remains the only trained scientist to have gone.
The rest of the grid: GRISSOM, COOPER and CARPENTER from the first American group, Alan BEAN and Al WORDEN from Apollo, Mae JEMISON, the first Black woman in space and later the first real astronaut to appear in Star Trek, Peggy WHITSON with more time off the planet than any other American, Chris HADFIELD, who recorded a song aboard the station, and Tim PEAKE, who ran a marathon in orbit strapped to a treadmill.