Character
Biography

General Thomas Collins
Project Director

United States Air Force

Warning:
May Contain Spoilers

• Thomas Collins' Age Information
  
  1984: age 52
  1985: age 53
  1986: age 54
  1987: age 55
  1988: age 56
  1989: age 57
  1990: age 58

• Vital Statistics
  
  -Born June 2nd, 1932 in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
  
  -Ten years later, his father helped open the Alamogordo Army Air Field which would later be renamed to Holloman Air Force Base.
  
  -On October 14th, 1947, Collins witnessed Captain Charles E. Yeager in the Bell X-1 rocket as he completed the first successful attempt at breaking the sound barrier.
  
  -In 1950, Collins enlisted in the Air Force as an officer and began a long career stationed at Holloman where he built and mastered several different components of aircraft and spacecraft development.
  
  -On November 29, 1961, ENOS, a chimpanzee trained at Holloman’s HAM facility (Holloman Aero-Medical laboratory), was the first U.S. specimen launched into orbit. ENOS was launched in a Mercury-Atlas capsule that completed two orbits around the earth and was safely recovered three hours, 21 minutes later. Thomas Collins was instrumental in the development of the Mercury-Atlas 5 that carried the chimp into space.
  
  -Collins supervised Lieutenant's Junior Grade Al Calavicci and Johnny Bartlett from 1962 to 1966 at Holloman Air Force Base until they were both sent to Vietnam.
  
  -In 1977, Collins was assigned to the White Sands base. Under his command was Jack Weitzman. They tested several methods of energy transfer with military applications on the old atomic bomb range there.
  
  -On March 30, 1982, he assisted (from the ground) NASA astronauts in landing the Space Shuttle Columbia at the White Sands Space Harbor.
  
  -Following that event, Collins was assigned to head the top-secret government project called Starbright and promoted to General.
  
  -Collins brought Al Calavicci and Johnny Bartlett onto the project as his first and second assistant directors. He also brought in the man responsible for finding the heart of SID, his nephew Sebastian LoNigro.