For almost her whole life, Eileen Collins’ goal was to go “farther, faster and higher” than those who came before her. Eventually, she would achieve this goal by becoming the first woman to pilot and command an American spacecraft, logging 872 hours in space.
Collins discussed her path to becoming an astronaut at the Welty Gala on Friday night – Mississippi University for Women’s annual fundraiser benefiting the university’s scholarship fund – and her 2021 memoir “Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars.”
Collins said in college, she joined a Reserve Officer Training Corps program. At the time, the first test program opened for women to become Air Force pilots. To make herself more competitive for the program, Collins called a local airport and spent $1,000 going through training to get her pilot’s license.
“I was actually afraid to call the airport and ask them to teach me how to fly, because I thought they were going to say no because I was a girl,” Collins said. “I sat on this for a long time and … it took the most courage up to this point in my life, and I called them.”
After Collins completed this training, she applied to the Air Force program, joining three other women in Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Over time, she built trust with both male and female pilots in her program, as she blocked out all distractions and focused on flying.
“I think one of the reasons that women were so successful back then is because we were disciplined and we wanted to be pilots,” Collins said. “We really wanted to be. We had a passion to be military pilots. But we also knew that how we did didn’t just determine if we got our wings. It would determine if women in the future would get a chance to fly.”
Into space
Collins became a United States Air Force colonel before being selected for NASA’s astronaut program in 1990. She said over the next 15 years she flew in space four times.
In February 1995, Collins became the first woman to pilot a Space Shuttle with the STS-63 Discovery mission. She described what the launch was like, talking about the intense thrust necessary to leave the Earth and reach the point of Main Engine Cut Off.
Collins said at MECO, everything went to zero gravity immediately, and everything started floating, including her checklist and the dust around her. Despite this incredible moment, Collins said she stayed busy working.
“I was the first woman pilot of a space shuttle and all I could think about was ‘I don’t want to make a mistake,’ because if I make a mistake, they’re going to say, oh, the woman did it,” Collins said. “I didn’t want to make a mistake.”
Collins said her flight engineer had to remind her to look up and see her first sunrise in space, which looked like a “rainbow” of white, blue, red and yellow.
Following this first flight, Collins went on two more missions, becoming the first woman to command a shuttle mission with her flight on the STS-93 Columbia in July 1999.
Five weeks before Collins final launch was scheduled, the Columbia space shuttle broke up upon re-entry, which caused the deaths of seven astronauts. Following the loss, Collins’ final mission was pushed back by three years before she commanded the STS-114 Discovery “Return to Flight” mission in July 2005.
Collins said when NASA ended the space shuttle program, she agreed with the decision, since it was done to mitigate risk. But today, she said astronauts take the SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket with a Dragon capsule on top, which she said is safer, cheaper and more efficient.
In the future, she said she sees potential for more space tourism, but also for space travel to grow in other ways, based on the research still ongoing at the International Space Station.
“Basically, we’re learning how to live safely and efficiently in space because we want to go back to the moon. The United States has a goal of building space stations at the South Pole of the moon, where we think there’s ice … and eventually going to Mars.”
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