Doing this blog is indulging a personal passion, one which just happens to interest other people. It is also, in a small way, my personal tribute to Apollo and the men that flew the missions. I’m no scientist, but I’m an alright writer (that’s what I like to tell my clients, anyway) – so this is about as good as it’s gonna get from me.

The problem with writing about a personal passion is that, perhaps inevitably, I can be swayed by bias. I am constantly on the watch for this seeping in to my writing here, especially after I observed my pre-me-non-NASA-obsessive husband talking about missions with the same views I hold. As I am writing about something very personal, I don’t have that clinical separation from the subject that I do in my professional writing – and as my husband has demonstrated, I’m clearly liable to spreading my own bias to others.

Yet I can’t help but feel there is also an inevitability that some of my personal feelings come in to play. I’m only human, and I’ve never masked the fact that I come at Apollo from an emotive rather than scientific level. I do have favourite missions. While I won’t let my personal feelings play with facts and figures and overall feeling, at some point it is going to out.

A family member asked me, a few weeks ago, a question that made me look all the more into the issue of bias and favouritism. “Do you,” she asked, “have a favourite Apollo astronaut?”

My answer was a fairly blase “I respect them all” or something similar, which is absolutely true – but it did make me wonder. Do I have a “favourite”? Could it be a problem for the way I write this site? What the heck is a favourite anyway? Surely it’s not possible to quantify a human being like that?

I mused this in an email to a friend, who responded with a very basic: “well, do you have a favourite wrestler?” (Yes, for my sins, I’m a WWE fan). Of course, I do… but he’s a human being too, yet here I am, quantifying him. So does that extend to astronauts?

The answer, of course, is yes – although perhaps not in the singular. I have what I would describe several astronauts I am always keen to hear from. I mean the guys that, when they pop up on a documentary, I pay a little bit more attention. This doesn’t mean I dislike any of the other Apollo astronauts, it’s just an observation that lead to this post – because, when I’d a list of my favourites, I began wondering if I could see any uniting factors.

I can’t continue without listing those favourites, because it rules out the point of the post. So, in no particular order, the astronauts I am particularly interested in are:

• John Young.
• Charlie Duke.
• Jim Lovell.
• Al Bean.
• Michael Collins.

I have plenty others – a huge affection for Pete Conrad, and my respect for Neil Armstrong knows no bounds – but these are the five who never fail to capture my attention. With the list made, I started looking for things that bound them together.

What did I find? Well, nothing.

My first inkling was to check and see if they were all “moonwalkers”. Nope, I’ve got Lovell and Collins in there. Fine, moving on… maybe they’re all from the same armed force? No, not that either. Same missions? No. Same crew positions? Uh-uh. On and on it went, until I was halfway to calculating their astrological signs in trying to find something.

What I was looking for is something that would make this “favouritism” easily explainable, because then – in a rather scattergun manner – I could be aware of it. If, for example, I found a bias towards Naval-aviators-cum-astronauts, I would know to take extra care when writing about Air Force crew. Yet I didn’t find a thing.

I see, however, that I was doing it incorrectly. I was looking for statistical similarities, when in fact I should have been looking at it from an emotive point of view. Probably for the first time in my entire existence, I was being too scientific.

The reason the five appeal to me is fairly simple. I would say, of the Apollo astronauts I have seen interviewed, they are the best at displaying their feelings – or, they’ve made me laugh. John Young is as dry as they come, but I cracked up laughing when he, talking of Apollo 13, said simply: “Jim called down that they had a problem. And he was right”. They are, in essence, the astronauts I find the most entertaining.

Bean and Duke are natural born storytellers, naturally funny, and quite wise. Collins, both in his book and in interview, comes across as somewhat with a unique perspective on the world and humanity itself. Lovell has a tragic-but-triumphant story that appeals to the dire romantic in me, while Young makes me laugh.

So, I do have favourites – but the great thing is, I don’t think such an emotional reason for it will effect my writing in any way. Sure, it may make me a little more likely to wax lyrical about them, but that’s no bad thing.

This, of course, leaves only one question to be answered: do I, your diligent yet unbiased writer, have a favourite astronaut? Sure I do. Even in that small grouping taken from another small grouping, there’s one man that stands out to me above them all. As for who, well, that’s for me to know and the blog to never reveal.