Eileen Collins

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Eileen Collins
Eileen Collins
Country: United States
Organization: NASA
selected on Jan 17, 1990
(13th NASA Group)
Calls: 4 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		3rd February 1995
Landing of the
last space flight: 		August 9, 2005
Time in space: 36d 6h 41min
retired on May 2006
Space flights

Eileen Marie Collins (born November 19, 1956 in Elmira , New York , USA ) is a former American astronaut .

biography

Collins is the second of a total of four children - two boys and two girls - from Rose and James Collins, who were involved in an alternative housing project in Elmira, which was partly financed by government funds.

While the children were in elementary school (St. Patrick's Catholic School), their mother worked in the local juvenile detention center during the day. Money was tight, so Collins had to switch high schools. After two years from the private Catholic Notre Dame High School, she went to the public Elmira Free Academy. Immediately after graduating from high school in 1974, Collins began studying at Corning Community College in Corning, New York, just a few miles from Elmira. The mother financed her daughter's studies with public grants and loans. After graduating in math and science in 1976, Collins joined the U.S. Air Force (it was the first year women were accepted as pilots). This granted her a scholarship with which she enrolled at the private Syracuse University in Syracuse (New York). Collins studied math and economics, graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1978 , and then began serving in the Air Force.

Collins first made her military pilot's license in Oklahoma at Vance Air Force Base. She was one of only four women among 320 male flight students. There followed three years as an instructor on T-38 training aircraft. In 1983 she was transferred to California , where she commanded C-141 Starlifter long-range transport aircraft and gave training courses at Travis Air Force Base . There she met her husband Patrick, who also worked as an instructor at the Travis Air Force Base. In 1987 the two married in Colorado on the campus of the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA).

When Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was assassinated in a military coup on the Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983 , troops from the United States and six Caribbean states landed on the island a few days later to curb Cuba's influence . Collins was on the operation called "Operation Urgent Fury" , brought students and their families out of the country with her C-141, and received an award for it. In 1985, she resumed her studies at the Air Force Institute of Technology , located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton , Ohio , but soon returned to the West Coast, where she completed her Masters in Labor Research in California in 1986 Stanford University . At the time, Collins had first applied to NASA as an astronaut. When her request was rejected, she went to the USAFA in Colorado Springs (Colorado). There she took a position as assistant professor of mathematics for three years and was also an instructor on the T-41 Mescalero training aircraft . In the meantime, she had even further down to school and at the Catholic 1989 Webster University in St. Louis ( Missouri made the Master of Space Management). Then she gave up her teaching career and settled in the United States Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS) on the July 1989 from Edwards Air Force Base in California to test pilot train. She got her diploma a year later, in July 1990, at the top of her class, when she already had her training contract as an astronaut in her pocket. Since she literally looked after her classmates and later also her crew like a “mother”, she was given her nickname as a pilot and nickname “Mom” on the TPS.

NASA activity

Collins aboard the Columbia Space Shuttle in 1999

Ever since Collins watched the glider pilots as a child on nearby Harris Hill during the summer months, her desire to fly had been awakened. She had to earn the money for the expensive flight lessons herself. And so she was already of legal age when she had the necessary money to learn to fly by working at night as a waitress in a pizzeria in 1977 - in the mornings she studied at Corning Community College and in the afternoons she went to the airfield.

Always looking for further flying challenges, Collins submitted her application documents to NASA as a shuttle pilot for the first time in 1986. In her second attempt she made the leap into the astronaut squad, and she was introduced in mid-January 1990 with the 13th group. She was the only woman among the seven prospective pilots. In general, she was the first female shuttle pilot that NASA selected. (The astronaut corps has been mixed since 1978, so far women had only been accepted as mission specialists).

The one-year foundation course was completed in July 1991 and Collins initially worked in the space shuttle technology department at the Johnson Space Center . She then supported the shuttle crews during the preparations for take-off.

In September 1993 it was set up for its first space flight. She was the first woman in the pilot's seat of a space shuttle when the STS-63 began a new chapter in US-Russian cooperation in space . In February 1995, Discovery was the first space shuttle to head for the Mir space station . Collins and her commander Jim Wetherbee navigated the orbiter on the fourth day of flight to within eleven meters of the station and held this position for ten minutes. Later, two crew members undertook a space exit (EVA) : When Bernard Harris (first African American on an EVA) and Mike Foale (first British on a walk) worked in the payload bay for four and a half hours, Collins coordinated the EVA from the cockpit.

Interrupted by maternity leave, Collins then worked as a liaison officer ( CapCom ) on operations management in Houston until her next nomination .

In mid-July 1996, Eileen Collins was named as a pilot for the STS-84 . It was the sixth coupling mission under the Shuttle-Mir program. The Atlantis left for Mir Station on May 15, 1997. After docking, several tons of equipment and experiments were brought into the Russian space station. In addition, a team change was made. Astronaut Jerry Linenger was relieved after four months and returned to Earth by shuttle. Mike Foale took his place. After nine days, the STS-84 mission ended on May 24th.

From August 1997, Collins headed the spacecraft systems department of the astronauts office for half a year.

When Eileen Collins was given her first command of her own in March 1998, it was a media event. Hillary Clinton , the wife of the US President, told reporters at the White House that Collins would lead the STS-93 mission . The main task of the company, which was carried out in July 1999, was to deploy the AXAF (Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility) X-ray telescope , which was named Chandra before it was launched , in honor of the physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar , who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his theory of stellar evolution would have.

Collins then served as the commander of space shuttle flight STS-114 , the first flight after the Columbia disaster . When Collins was selected for this mission in August 2001, the launch was scheduled for November 2002. At that time nobody suspected that this flight would mean the resumption of shuttle flight operations. The mission order had been modified during the training, the core crew remained unchanged. Originally, STS-114 was planned as a pure logistics flight , which should bring the ISS Expedition 7 to the International Space Station (ISS) and the sixth permanent crew back to Earth. When STS-114 left for the ISS on July 26, 2005, the change of crew had been deleted from the flight plan and the focus was on testing the changes made to the shuttle system over the past two and a half years.

According to NASA

On May 1, 2006, NASA announced that Collins was leaving the space agency. The astronaut wants to “pursue private interests and spend more time with her family”.

On February 24, 2009, IT company GB Tech announced that Eileen Collins would be hired as a program manager. She will lead a team whose task it is to win and implement the ITAMS contract from NASA (ITAMS: Information Technology and Multimedia Services) for GB Tech.

On April 20, 2013, Collins was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame as an official member .

Private

Collins is married with a daughter and a son.

See also

Web links

Commons : Eileen Collins  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tariq Malik: NASA's First Female Shuttle Commander Retires from Spaceflight. space.com, May 1, 2006, accessed February 27, 2009 .
  2. ↑ Eileen Collins joins GB Tech. (No longer available online.) Your Houston News, Nov. 22, 2009, archived from the original on June 6, 2016 ; accessed on September 3, 2012 .
  3. ↑ Britt Kennerly: 3 inducted into Astronaut Hall of Fame . In: USA Today , April 20, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Collins, Eileen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Collins, Eileen Marie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronaut
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Elmira , New York, USA