Al Weisel

 

Miss Universe: Astronaut Eileen Collins

By Al Weisel

Us Magazine, April 1999, p. 27

 

In 1962, not long after John Glenn became the first American to orbit planet Earth, the squeaky-clean hero testified before Congress against including women in the space program. It was already a "fact of our social order," Glenn said, that they were excluded from being military pilots—a prerequisite for all astronauts at the time. But Eileen Collins couldn't have cared less. Back then, she was a skinny blond 5-year-old growing up in the small, working-class town of Elmira, N.Y. "I admired the astronauts, but I knew all the astronauts were men," she recalls. "As a child, I wasn't upset about that. But as I grew up, I started wondering, why don't we have any women doing this?" Eventually, NASA got with the program. Last March, Collins, now a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was chosen to be the first female space-shuttle commander. She takes off April 18 in Space Shuttle Columbia.

Collins had to bust through a few glass ceilings on her way into space. But she won't be bearing any grudges when she leads a crew of three men and one woman on a five day mission to launch the Chandra X-ray telescope which will allow scientists the most advanced methods of studying X-rays given off by celestial bodies. In fact, Collins believes Glenn was accurate about the social order. "But whether or not our social order was right is very questionable," she says. "I don't t think it was right."

Growing up, Collins played with chemistry and dreamed of becoming a teacher. Her parents, James, a postal worker, and Rose Marie, a clerical worker at the maximum security Elmira Correctional Facility split up when she was 9. It hit me like a ton of bricks," she says, "but children are very adaptable." Her father briefly lost his job around that time and the family went on food stamps. "The [food stamps] program did what it was designed to do, which is help people get through hard times in their life," she says.

Immediately after taking her first flight on a commercial airliner, at 19, Collins knew she had found her calling. "I had been reading about pilots, and it fascinated me," she says. "The first time women were accepted as pilots in the military was in 1974, just as I was reading about it. The timing was perfect." Becoming an astronaut wasn't a "realistic dream," however, until she graduated from college in 1978, the year NASA selected its first women shuttle astronauts

Collins was in the first pilot-training class to include women at Oklahoma's Vance Air Force Base. "We had a lot of media attention," she recalls. "Everyone knew who we were and what we looked like and who we were dating." Ironically, while the men she served with were supportive, their wives were not, at first. "I was in my flight suit at the commissary," Collins recalls, "and the woman at the checkout counter said, 'A lot of the wives aren't happy you're here, because they think you're going to go off with their husbands.' I decided I would go out of my way to be the most honest, straightforward person. I was not going to run around with their husbands. I ended up being friends with some of the wives."

Collins met pilot Pat Youngs in 1983 while they were both stationed at Travis Air Force Base in California, flying C-141 cargo transport planes, and married him in 1988. Youngs now flies for Delta Air Lines, and the couple have a 3-year-old daughter, Bridget. In 1980, they moved to Colorado where Collins taught mathematics at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Her application to NASA to join the space program was approved in January 1990.

Today, the Collinses, like the families of the other astronauts live in the suburbs of Houston to be near tile space center. Collins' duties often call her away to Florida, where astronauts train for the space-shuttle missions. "Now that I'm a mom, I realize how stressful child care is," she says. Youngs and a nanny will handle child-care duties back home when Collins leads her shuttle crew on the April mission. For the first time Bridget will see what Mommy does for a living.

For Collins, who became the first female pilot of a space shuttle in 1995, the thought of a shuttle ride, no matter what the particular mission, is always thrilling. The launch "sounds like you're standing in a room that's on fire." she says, recalling her first flight, in 1995. "The engines turn off at eight and a half minutes, and you're immediately at zero gravity. I pulled out my pen and it floated. I thought, I'm here—I'm in space. I was up there 10 minutes and saw my first sunrise in space. It was just beautiful." Only an astronaut, though, knows the deeper satisfactions of space travel "The kind of shampoo we use is like a gel," Collins says. "You put it on and let it dry. You can't rinse it out. It makes your hair beautiful, believe it or not." In space there are no bad-hair days.■

 

Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.

 

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