First woman shuttle pilot 'can't wait' for next mission

The woman set to command the next space shuttle mission says she cannot wait for her lift-off orders, despite the Columbia disaster.

Eileen Collins’ love affair with space started as a schoolgirl with an article in a school magazine about the Gemini astronauts.

It was a “pro” and “con” piece about whether the country should be spending money on the space programme. Young Eileen didn’t consider it a question for debate.

“I couldn’t understand why anybody would say no,” the 46-year-old Air Force colonel recalled. “Why would they not want to explore?”

Now, nearly four decades later, the shuttle Columbia disaster has renewed a debate that grew stronger after the 1986 Challenger explosion. After the loss of 14 astronauts and two shuttles, the programme has been suspended indefinitely, and some question whether the United States should continue risking human lives in space.

But Collins doesn’t see cause for question, even though she is set to command the first mission following the February 1 destruction of Columbia.

“We cannot wait to go fly,” said Collins, whose July 1999 trip on Columbia made her the first woman to command a shuttle mission. “I’m a firm believer in getting people off the planet.”

Collins was watching Nasa TV with her two-year-old son that Saturday morning when Mission Control lost contact with Columbia. A few hours later, she was at Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas offering to help find out what happened to the shuttle.

It didn’t take her long to realise that her place was with her crew, and that her job was to prepare them for the upcoming flight on Atlantis. The mission was set for March, to do repairs on the international space station and swap out its crew.

But Columbia’s demise has grounded her and the shuttles indefinitely.

“When the shuttle programme is ready to fly again, and the investigation is complete, they do whatever they need to do, we’re going to be at that one month from launch point,” she said.

“I trust the folks that are working on the investigation and I know by the time we fly, we’re going to be safe. And whatever they find out happened, we will be able to minimise the risk of that happening again.”

After Collins caught the space bug growing up in Elmira, New York, she found frustratingly little to feed her new appetite for space literature. So she satisfied that hunger by reading about Second World War and Korean War military pilots.

By the time she was 20, she had saved up $1,000 to start flying lessons. She cut her teeth in a Cessna 150.

She soloed for the first time in 1976. That’s the same year the US Air Force selected its first female pilots.

When she learned the air force was a possibility, she declared herself a maths major and began laying the groundwork for a military career. In 1978, Nasa selected the first six women astronauts – they were in the first shuttle class.

While Collins was stationed at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, the women came there as part of their space training.

“And it was all over the papers – ‘The astronauts are here’,” she recalled. “And I started thinking, ‘You know? That’s what I want to do’.”

Collins worked her way up through the air force ranks, serving as a pilot and instructor. She graduated from the Air Force Test Pilot School in 1990 and was selected by Nasa for the space programme.

In 1995, she became the first female shuttle pilot when she rendezvoused Discovery with the Russian space station Mir. She visited Mir again two years later as pilot of Atlantis. She has logged a total of 8.4 million miles in space.