Michael Collins (born October 31, 1930) is a former astronaut and test pilot who was the command module pilot of Apollo 11 in 1969. The first person to perform more than one spacewalk, he is one of 24 people to have flown to the Moon. Collins joined the U.S. Air Force after graduating from West Point in 1952. He graduated in 1960 from the Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School and was selected for NASA's third group of astronauts in 1963. He made two spacewalks on his first mission on Gemini 10 in 1966. During Apollo 11, he remained in orbit around the Moon in the command module Columbia while his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first crewed landing on the surface. After retiring from NASA, Collins became Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and later director of the National Air and Space Museum. Under his guidance, the museum opened on time and within budget for the United States Bicentennial in 1976.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_%28astronaut%29

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1517:

According to some traditional accounts, Martin Luther (depicted) posted his Ninety-five Theses onto the door of the All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, present-day Germany, marking the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses

1973:

Three Provisional Irish Republican Army members escaped from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin aboard a hijacked helicopter that landed in the prison's exercise yard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountjoy_Prison_helicopter_escape

1999:

Australian sailor Jesse Martin arrived in Melbourne, becoming the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, non-stop, and unassisted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Martin

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

bunny boiler: (slang, humorous, derogatory) A person who acts (or may supposedly act) obsessively or even dangerously towards another person with whom the first person was previously, or wishes to be, in a relationship with. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bunny_boiler

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

I assert that every man is a partialist; that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that, each man's genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field, goes through every point of pumpkin history.   --Ralph Waldo Emerson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson