Just seconds into Eileen Collins’ first flight as a space shuttle commander in 1999, an electrical glitch forced her to prepare for a harrowing emergency landing that no shuttle had ever attempted.
Though the shuttle reached orbit safely, Collins’ cool response to the trouble-ridden launch helped seal the admiration of colleagues who say it’s fitting she will lead the first shuttle mission since 2003, when the Columbia accident killed seven astronauts.
The future of manned spaceflight may ride on this mission, slated for launch this week, but Collins has handled this sort of pressure and spotlight before.
The 1999 shuttle flight–the first time a woman had led a U.S. space mission–was nearly doomed because of faulty wiring that knocked out computers controlling two of the shuttle’s three main engines. Had a backup controller failed for either engine, the shuttle would have had to do a U-turn at breakneck speeds and return to a landing strip at Cape Canaveral.
In a recent interview Collins calmly relived the moment, describing failure lights that started blinking in her cockpit as the situation worsened. In her mind, she said, she was running through all of the crew’s options, from an emergency landing to a desperate bailout.
While those options weren’t necessary because the backups did their job, Collins said the experience reminded her that space travel means expecting the worst.
“We always think about the next failure,” Collins said, “so we’re ready for wherever that would lead us.”
It’s been a dramatic journey already for Collins, 48, the daughter of a working-class family from upstate New York, who spent three years working to save $1,000 for her first flying lessons at age 19. She went from a local community college to Syracuse University and Stanford, then rose steadily in the ranks of the Air Force to become only the second woman to graduate from the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
A nickname that fits
That’s where Collins earned the call signal other pilots used to identify her: “Mom.” She said her fellow pilots chose it because she was their class leader, acting as a liaison with the school administration. The nickname still fits, said Charles Camarda, one of six other astronauts who will join Collins on the shuttle Discovery.
“As a good mom she looks over this crew,” Camarda said. “And if need be she keeps us in line.”
Asked for an example of her nurturing side, Discovery mission specialist Stephen Robinson laughed and shook his head.
“If you have a cold, she’ll call you up at home to see how you’re feeling, and tell you to be sure you don’t go outside,” Robinson said. “And the same person can fly an airplane with more skill than almost anybody I’ve ever seen. Can you imagine having a boss like that?”
With the calm, almost eerie self-assurance common among top pilots, Collins is an aeronautics wonk in khaki pants and beige pumps. In her scarce free time she devours huge volumes of technical manuals and feedback from her flight simulator trainers. She says she’s always asking if she can learn more about the spacecraft, though her colleagues say no one knows it better than she does.
Her personal life seems a perfect marriage of celestial ambition and earthly priorities.
She had each of her two children soon after flying shuttle missions–her daughter Bridget is 9 and her son Luke is 4. Collins met her husband, fellow pilot Pat Youngs, when they were both flying C-141 cargo planes in the Air Force. She has jealously shielded their privacy even as her historic place in the space program blossomed.
Yet sometimes the intrinsic risks of her job intrude. She told a NASA interviewer recently that she had decided in December 2002 that her daughter was old enough to understand the Challenger accident of 1986.
“I told her [that problem] has been fixed, and that will never happen again,” Collins said. “Then, five weeks later, we had the Columbia accident. I had to start that process over with her.”
Collins sought to comfort her daughter the same way she reassures herself about flying–with tons of knowledge.
They went together to see the shuttle flight simulator, the T-38 training jets shuttle pilots use, and the immense pool at Johnson Space Center in Houston where astronauts practice space walks. She felt that understanding how spaceflight works would help her daughter accept its dangers.
“I don’t take crazy risks,” Collins said. “I’m afraid to get on a roller coaster, I really am. It’s dumb. I have no control over the thing once I’m on it.”
In contrast, she believes astronauts can control the risks they take.
“I wouldn’t fly this mission if I thought it was unsafe,” she said. “I tell my children it’s going to be a safe mission, and we’re going to be back in 13 days.”
Flying spacecraft seemed an unlikely fate when Collins finished high school in Elmira, N.Y., an average student with little clear idea of what to do with her life.
Her parents were her heroes. James Collins, a surveyor for the city, was “a hard-working Irish Catholic type person,” she said. When Eileen was 9, Rose Marie Collins went to work in the parole division of a local penitentiary after separating from her husband. For a while Collins lived in public housing.
“We were middle class–I would tend to say lower middle class,” Collins said. “We didn’t have an easy life.”
Dreams take flight
Collins had attended summer camp near Harris Hill, where pilots launch gliders in winds that made Elmira the nation’s “soaring capital.” Her family couldn’t afford flying lessons–or even an airplane ticket–but she knew she wanted to fly someday.
She enrolled at Corning Community College, home now to the Eileen Collins Observatory with its 20-inch telescope. At the time her father thought she should be an accountant.
“She was always a solid student, but she never really stood out until all of a sudden she found what really excited her,” said Lawrence Josbeno, a physics professor at the college who has gotten to know Collins through her many visits back to the school.
The flying lessons she had saved for years to afford offered the spark she needed. She became an Air Force flier after graduating from the Syracuse ROTC program, and she steadily rose to join the male-dominated ranks of the Air Force Test Pilot School in 1989.
It didn’t take long for Collins to fit in, said Lt. Col. Mark Stucky, who attended the school with her. On one of her first nights–before her husband had joined her–the male pilots barged into her room in the middle of the night, lifted her up from bed and took her to a party, where they threw her into a hot tub.
“She took it well in stride,” Stucky said.
Colleagues who watch her now say Collins is a natural pilot–low-key, persistent and unflappable. She will guide Discovery through several new maneuvers, including a challenging 360-degree flip designed to allow astronauts on the International Space Station to inspect the shuttle’s underside for damage. The task is vital because an undetected hole on the leading edge of the shuttle Columbia’s left wing caused that ship to disintegrate when it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
Astronaut Robinson said that like a musician’s talent, what makes Collins’ flying special is hard to define.
“It comes down to almost the artistry of just having mastered the machine,” Robinson said. “And she’s got it. Boy, has she ever got it.”
Although she says she wants the crew to have some fun during the mission, taking it easy is the one thing Collins seems to be bad at.
She’s brought compact discs on previous flights–each astronaut is allowed to take 20–but she said she’s never played one while in orbit. And although her official biography lists reading as one of her hobbies, Collins freezes up when asked to name her favorite book.
After a long pause, she mentions the Bible. Although she once enjoyed reading for leisure, she confesses that most of her spare time these days is taken up by reading still more manuals.
“I gotta tell you, I came back from my last flight and I tried to read a novel, and it was boring. I couldn’t get into it,” she said. “My life was, like, way above anything I could read in a book.”
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jmanier@tribune.com
