Eileen Collins, former NASA astronaut and the first woman to pilot a space shuttle, attended the Women in Space event at University of Nevada, Reno on March 21 and took a few minutes to discuss the inner workings of aerospace missions with Lydia Snow of the Elko Daily Free Press.
In her journey to become an astronaut, Collins was the second woman to attend the United States Air Force Test Pilot School, also teaching math at the United States Air Force Academy from 1986 to 1989.
Collins piloted the space shuttle Discovery for NASA’s 1995 mission STS-63. The mission performed a rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir.
With the STS-144 mission in 2005, Collins became the first astronaut to perform a 360-degree pitch maneuver with Space Shuttle Orbiter, which allowed the ISS to photograph the underside of the shuttle.
LS: What was your experience teaching math at the Air Force Academy in Colorado? Are there any experiences that stick with you?
EC: I taught calculus and differential integral multivariate calculus. I also taught linear algebra in aero engineering. The one thing that sticks out in my mind is when the cadets would ask me, “Ma'am, why do I need to know this?” And at first, they stumped me with the question, but as I thought about it, the reason they need to know math and the reason everyone needs to know math, is it teaches you how to solve problems. Everyone has problems in their life every day. And what math teaches you is to define a problem. It’s very objective. You define a problem, you look at "what are the tools that are available? What order do you put them in?"
Then, you solve the problem. And I find that translates to everyday life in the things that we do, because we'll find whether it's an engineering problem or a personal problem, we use the same technique: define what is the problem and then what are the tools available to solve it. So I think math is important for everyone to take. Everyone should take math through their senior year in high school.
LS: How did you feel being the second woman pilot to attend United States Air Force test pilot school? What barriers were in the way? How did you overcome them and how did it shape you as a person?
EC: There were actually several women engineers that went through the school before and then the first woman was Jackie Parker. She went through in 1988. I came in 1989.
I think for the most part, people were happy to have the women there. I didn't see any negativity — they didn't want to wash us out because we were women. I think the leadership at the school really wanted the women to succeed. But the biggest challenge for me was not really being a woman. I was the senior ranking officer, so I was made the class leader. That was a much bigger challenge, being the class leader, having that extra responsibility of taking care of the class, in addition to just studying and flying and getting through the school curriculum.
LS: How did your time in the Air Force prepare you for your time at NASA?
EC: It was great preparation. I think the military is a great training ground to give a young person confidence, to teach a person to be a team player, to teach a person leadership, to teach a person to really formulate the concept of mission. “Why are we here? What is our job? What is the purpose of everything that we're doing?” That is your mission statement. And my time in the Air Force helped me maintain that mindset of always staying focused on the mission. Not worrying about my own personal distractions but yet focusing on being part of a team — that mental mindset was very important to take into the space program.
LS: In preparation for the Discovery mission, you flew over 500 approaches and landings in the Shuttle Training Aircraft. What was this process like and how did all the practice prepare you for the mission?
EC: The Shuttle Training Aircraft was a Gulfstream II aircraft. We had four of them and they were all modified. The left seat was modified for the astronauts to sit there and fly it like a space shuttle. The controls and the displays all looked exactly like the space shuttle. The right seat belonged to the instructor. But that side was still a Gulfstream II. And we also modified the outside of the Gulfstream II to add drag devices like flaps, slats, to put the landing gear down early and speed brakes to make the Gulfstream II descend in the high descent rate that the shuttle had. So it was a true in-flight simulator that was a great preparation to actually do the landing. You mentioned 500 approaches to be a pilot. To be a shuttle commander, you need 1,000 approaches. So I spent a lot of time in that Gulfstream II.
LS: How would you break down the process of what it's like to pilot a space shuttle for the average person?
EC: I was a pilot of the space shuttle, and it really is all about hand-eye coordination. But being a pilot, you begin with, "Where am I and where do I want to go and how do I get there?" And in our case, we had the space shuttle which was really three things. It was a rocket on launch, it was a satellite in orbit, and it was an airplane coming home. And in all of those phases, we had to train to hand-fly, stick-and-rudder-type flying. The launch was done on autopilot, with the computers and the flight control system. We had to train to fly it manually in case the computer failed. And then in space, you could use autopilot when you're a satellite but we also hand-flew it — like when we did a random move with the space station, it was all flown by the commander.
LS: Describe what a 360-degree pitch maneuver, the sort you flew on the shuttle orbiter, is and how it works.
EC: My crew was the first to fly that. That was back in 2005. So, the space station is up there at 200 to 220 or 230 miles, roughly. And when the space shuttle rendezvoused and docked we came from below. When we hit 600 feet away from the space station, we stopped and we pitched the shuttle around. The nose went up into a full 360-degree pitch. And the reason we did that — we actually hand-flew to that point — we started the maneuver, we would put it on autopilot during the maneuver and then at the end we would take over manually and fly the rest of the rendezvous. But the whole reason for pausing and doing that flip around was so the astronauts on the space station could photograph the bottom of the shuttle. They were looking for any damage to the tiles, the heat shield. And those digital pictures they took were downloaded to Mission Control. The engineers in Mission Control would survey those pictures to see if there was damage. We were the first ones to fly it but that maneuver was flown on every shuttle mission to the end of the program.
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