Eileen Collins’ Unlikely Journey to Becoming the First Woman to Command NASA’s Space Shuttle

Eileen Collins didn’t want to put her life on the big screen. Standing on the dimly lit stage at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village at the premiere of a feature-length documentary about her life and career as an astronaut, Collins admitted that she first turned down the idea behind the film. “In the end, I said yes to the documentary because I have to tell myself, it’s not just about me,” Collins told the audience. “But I thought my story, because of where I came from and that we didn’t have money when I was a kid…that it was important for me not to worry about my privacy and to get my story out.”

Indeed, it’s not your typical astronaut story. Filmmaker Hannah Berryman explains that Collins’ unique background inspired her to tell the story of the first American woman to pilot and command NASA’s Space Shuttle in the new documentary Spacewoman. The film is partly based on Collins’ autobiography, Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars, and it details the astronaut’s journey towards making history, the perils faced along the way, and how she broke barriers in a strongly male-dominated field.

“When I was very young and first started reading about astronauts, there were no women astronauts,” Collins told Gizmodo. The former NASA astronaut grew up in Elmira, New York with a dream of becoming a pilot. Although money was tight, Collins worked several jobs to save enough for flying lessons. She joined the U.S. Air Force in 1978, just three years after a new policy allowed women to train as pilots. Around that same time, NASA selected the first class of astronauts that included women. Six out of the 35 astronaut candidates were women, and they were preparing for the space agency’s Space Shuttle program. Sally Ride became the first American woman to go to space in 1989 on board the Space Shuttle Challenger.

A year later, Collins joined NASA and first flew the Space Shuttle as a pilot in 1995. That marked the first time a woman had piloted the shuttle, and the mission included the spacecraft’s first approach to the Russian Space Station Mir. In 1998, Collins was named as the commander of the Space Shuttle mission to deploy the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in orbit, making her the first woman to command the reusable spacecraft.

This wasn’t an ordinary mission—it was NASA’s so-called “Return to Flight” mission as it took place around a year after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, which killed all seven astronauts on board the spacecraft as it broke apart during reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. “I knew that this mission was going to be my last mission, even before we had the accident,” Collins said. “I had no idea it would turn into what it turned into.”

Collins’ crew was five weeks away from launch when the Columbia tragedy took place. Rather than backing down from the mission, the incident made Collins more determined to command the shuttle for the nation’s return to space. “I walked into my training manager’s office and I said, I’m going to fly this mission, it’s going to be safe…because I knew if I had just quit, it would have sent the worst message,” Collins said.

The documentary delves into the astronaut’s personal life and how those monumental decisions in spaceflight history affected her family of four, particularly her seven-year-old daughter at the time. The film highlights the challenges Collins faced in maintaining her relationship with her daughter, Bridget Youngs, while preparing for space missions. It also reflects on Collins’ own relationship with both her parents, and the conditions of her upbringing that shaped her into the resilient woman she became.

Initially scheduled for liftoff in January 1999, the Space Shuttle Discovery finally launched on July 25, 2005 as NASA spent years researching and implementing safety upgrades for the spacecraft. It still wasn’t enough; debris struck Discovery during its launch and pieces of foam broke off the external tank of the space shuttle. This was the same issue that led to the tragic loss of Columbia, but Collins was determined that her crew would not meet the same fate.

As Discovery approached Mir, Collins performed a 360-degree flip, exposing the spacecraft’s belly to the astronauts on board the space station so that they could photograph its protective thermal tiles. The images were downlinked to ground control, revealing two areas where gap fillers were protruding from the shuttle. Three spacewalks were carried out to extract the fillers, and Discovery was cleared to return to Earth a day later. The space shuttle landed on August 20, 2005, bypassing an original landing date of August 8, 2005.

The documentary showcases the exceptional skill Collins needed to execute this first-of-a-kind maneuver, with control systems on the space shuttle being mostly manual at the time. “The Space Shuttle was designed in the 1970s, and the pilots and commanders had to know every single circuit breaker, every switch—they had to know how to run all those procedures, some of them by memory,” Collins said. “It took years and years of memorization, and sometimes the wrong switch could ka-boom, so we had to be very, very careful.”

“With the advent of all the technology that we have today, the new spacecraft are fully automatic, you can sit in the pilot’s seat and not be a certified pilot,” Collins added. “So there’s good and bad, I think it’s good that it’s much safer, the automation could even diagnose a problem for you, but it’s not quite as exciting as being able to drive it yourself.”

It’s been nearly 20 years since Collins felt the weightlessness of being in space, a feeling she clearly misses as she recalls flying to orbit and looking out onto Earth’s horizon (her least favorite thing being that there was no pizza in space). As she reflected on her retirement following the Discovery mission, Collins said, “It was sad to leave, I’d love to fly to space again. It’s really fun up there.”