Lessons from Space: Retired Pilot Col. Eileen Collins Relates Shuttle Concepts to Everyday Life

The year 1978 was almost as big a year for the space program as it was for disco. That was the year NASA officials hired their first space shuttle
pilots and also opened the field to women.
Retired Col. Eileen Collins was one of four women who were chosen that year for
undergraduate pilot training at Vance Air Force Base, Okla.
Eleven years after Colonel Collins completed her pilot training, a Seattle Times article called her “as hot a property as the Air Force had.” She eventually became the first woman to pilot and command a space shuttle.
Despite Skylab’s demise and Voyager’s rough start that year, 1978 proved to be a pivotal year for NASA and the 21-year-old training pilot who would accomplish so many firsts for the space program during her 16-year career as
an astronaut. While that year was the beginning of a string of firsts
during her Air Force and NASA career, Colonel Collins never considered anything impossible because of her gender, dating back to reading about famous pilots as a child. She assumed no woman had done it yet because none had tried.
She would try.
“About a week before I got there, NASA sent some of their shuttle astronauts to Vance for parachute training,” Colonel Collins said. “I remember reading
about it because it was in all the newspapers: ‘the first women astronauts at Vance Air Force Base.’
“That was when I thought I was learning to be a pilot, so there was no reason I couldn’t apply for a pilot’s job on the shuttle. That was the first year
I had a no-kidding, realistic chance at becoming an astronaut. Everything prior to that was just a pipe dream. So, 1978 was a real turning point for men and women at NASA.”
Interest in airplanes and astronauts began early for Colonel Collins, who grew up in Elmira, N.Y. She remembers her mother getting her out of bed when she was 12 to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969. In fourth grade, she read a Junior Scholastic article about the Gemini program.
As a teenager, she read books about Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran and Women’s
Airforce Service Pilots, but also books about male pilots, particularly those in combat.
“I would read about the military side of flying, mostly because there was so much written about it,” she said. “I just couldn’t get enough, not just of flying, but also of POWs and how the war was fought. I had this interest in military history and strategy.”
After Colonel Collins completed pilot training, she stayed at Vance as a T-38 Talon instructor pilot. Three years later, she volunteered for duty in combat fighters: the F-106 Delta Dart, F-15 Eagle and A-10 Thunderbolt II, but she had to revise her wish list because of the combat exclusionary law, which limited women’s participation in combat.
She flew the C-141 Starlifter at Travis AFB, Calif., and left in 1989 for Edwards AFB, Calif., where she became the second female pilot in the Air Force
Test Pilot Program. Before long, NASA officials selected her as an astronaut. Colonel Collins always believed her experience in the T-38 and C-141 gave her a major advantage with the selection board.
“I can’t emphasize enough how extremely important it was for me,” she said. “The T-38 is a high-performance jet aircraft trainer. You can
do acrobatics, formation and instrument flying. It’s the real thing. It has an ejection seat. You can kill yourself if you make bad decisions, or if the
aircraft has a malfunction and you’re not prepared to handle it. I got to talk on the radio, fly and navigate, all at the same time. That training is critical for flying in space.
“The C-141, on the other hand, while it wasn’t flip upside-down acrobatics,
the important thing about a crew airplane like that is you learn to manage a mission and you manage a crew. As an aircraft commander, your position is very important, not just to make sure the mission is safely completed, but you
have to lead your crew and manage your mission. When the astronaut selection board asked me that question, I tried to be as humble as I could, but if you think about the shuttle mission, it’s actually closer to the C-141 mission than it is to flying a fighter.”
Colonel Collins first piloted a space shuttle in 1995 on Space Transportation
System-63, a mission that involved a rendezvous and close-approach flight test of Discovery and the Russian space station Mir. She received the Harmon Trophy
for completing the historic mission as the first female shuttle pilot and returned to space two years later as pilot for STS-84 on Atlantis.
In July 1999, Colonel Collins became the first female shuttle commander on STS-93 with Columbia, which deployed the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the third of NASA’s four major observatories. She and her crew had to deal with two serious
incidents in the first few seconds of the mission.
“The first one was a hydrogen leak in one of our engines that started prior to liftoff,” Collins said. “The second problem was five seconds after liftoff. We had an electrical short that was due to all of the shaking. One of the wire
bundles had been rubbing against a screw head during maintenance, and some of the insulation was worn off.
“The wire-to-metal contact caused an interruption of power that caused some
of our water pumps to slow down and the two main engine controllers completely failed. The short was intermittent, so the power came back and the pumps restarted, but once a main engine controller fails, it’s gone. Fortunately, there are two main controllers on each engine, so we didn’t lose an engine. But we lost the redundancy of the controllers and that scared a lot of people. The shuttle was grounded for six months until they fixed these problems.”
After the Columbia disaster that killed all seven astronauts in 2003, NASA grounded the shuttle program for more than two years. In July and August 2005, Colonel Collins commanded the Return to Flight mission on STS-114 that tested a series of shuttle safety improvements, inspection tools and fuel tank
modifications, and restocked the International Space Station. She also became
the first astronaut to fly the shuttle through a complete 360-degree pitch maneuver so astronauts on the space station could photograph the shuttle’s underside to ensure there was no debris-related damage that could destroy the
shuttle upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.
Although the mission was successful, a large piece of foam still fell from the tank. The shuttle program was grounded for another year until NASA engineers completely corrected the problem.
“The big decision was whether the shuttle was ever going to fly again,” Colonel
Collins said. “To me, the answer was obvious: the shuttle should fly again. The mission of the shuttle was to build the space station and resupply the space station. Now, we’ve done that; the space station is 99 percent built. The shuttle will stop flying now because the mission is essentially over.”
As when Colonel Collins was named the first female shuttle commander, she faced
a whirlwind of media interviews before the Return to Flight mission. However, the tone had changed because of the nation’s concerns over the space program after the destruction of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia 17 years later.
“Back in 1999, when I became the first woman commander, and in 1995, when I
was named the first woman shuttle pilot, a lot of it was kind of hokey,” Colonel Collins said. “‘How does it feel to be the first woman?’ ‘What do people think?’ It was a lot of fluff, and I didn’t like doing that.
“But when we got the Return to Flight mission, people at that point didn’t care if it was a woman commander or not. Things were much more serious. It was all about, ‘Did we learn from the accident?’ ‘Are we getting the shuttle back
into space and are we going to get it back safely?’.
“I knew there was a need to get our message out to the country [about] what we
were doing, so I did every media request I could possibly do. We just had a horrible accident, and that changes people. It changed me.”
Since she retired from NASA in 2006, Colonel Collins has maintained a presence in the space program. She serves as chairperson of the NASA Advisory Council Space Operations Committee and has remained busy on the consulting and speaking circuit, along with spending time with her husband and their two children.
Colonel Collins also hopes to
write her autobiography soon and thinks the timing is right, as the shuttle program comes to a close. One of her biggest concerns, whether she’s sharing
her expertise as a space shuttle expert on the major news networks or speaking to audiences, is whether or not lessons were learned from
the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.
“Many of the lessons learned from Challenger were forgotten, leading up to the Columbia accident in 2003, which is why NASA needs to keep teaching those lessons,” Colonel Collins said. “I don’t care if you’re working in science, aeronautics, Earth observation or human space flight, you’ve got to learn
those lessons. They are very good lessons and apply to your family life, as well as your school or work life, even if you aren’t in the space program.
They are also very heartbreaking lessons.
“These lessons include being a better listener and approaching your job with a
sense of humility, relying on your co-workers, thoroughly testing all the hardware and creative thinking. Yes, foam can break a heat shield. We thought there’s no way this light piece of foam could break a heat shield, but it can if it’s going fast enough.
“Those are very big lessons I think we need to make sure we learn.”