Welcome to San Antonio files.

I'm Elizabeth Ruiz, and today's program is out of this world as we visit with retired Air Force colonel and astronaut Eileen Collins, the first American woman to pilot a space shuttle and the first female commander of a space shuttle mission.

Eileen is an author, a former USAA board member, and currently serves on the advisory committee for the Scobee Education Center at San Antonio College, and she was the Grand Marshal of the Battle of Flowers Parade in 2020.

She recently was featured in a documentary titled Space Woman and with Broad Space, A Woman Down to Earth.

For this episode of San Antonio Files.

We are so glad to have you with us.

Eileen, thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Liz.

I'm looking forward to it.

And I want to start out by asking you how you ended up in San Antonio.

When I talk to people about you, they say, I didn't know she lived in San Antonio.

They might have seen you at the grocery store.

They might see you walking around.

They don't know.

This is Eileen Collins is the first woman to pilot us for shuttle.

How did you end up?

Well, I like being under the radar, so to speak.

I know you.

Well.

First of all, let me say the most important thing is I love San Antonio and being in the Air Force.

And, you know, the times I've traveled around the world, I think this is the best city to live in, not just in the United States, but in the world.

And so I came here in 1978 when I started my first year in the Air Force.

I went through pilot training here out at Hondo, Texas, and we lived at Lackland.

And I remember thinking, you know, I think I want to be a guy from San Antonio, and I'm going to marry him and I'm going to live here.

And that's what I did.

So but I did I did leave San Antonio, and I had to go through the rest of my training and of course my Air Force career.

But it in the end, it brought me back here.

And you met Pat Young's, whose family is from San Antonio.

Right, right.

So my husband grew up here in San Antonio.

In fact, his mother was born over there on Cherry Street.

Her house is gone.

It's somewhere near where the current Alamodome is.

But.

So she was a native San Antonio.

And so it was really great to get to know him and his family.

He's one of six children and they, you know, all grew up here and went to school here.

So I feel like part of the family.

He's also a pilot.

Yeah.

So my husband is a pilot.

We met in the Air Force and he I think he did about 8 or 9 years of flying, see, 140 ones.

And then he went to fly for the airlines and he, recently retired.

So you, you accomplish what you set out to do.

You married a guy from San Antonio.

You can come live here.

And we are so glad you did.

Let's talk about your first trip to outer space.

And I say outer space because some of these rockets today, they just go up to space, they reach it and then come back down.

But in order to stay up there.

There is a difference I think people need to understand suborbital flight is where that's what Blue Origin is doing now with a lot of these, you know, like you've seen, you know, like Jeff Bezos, Michael Strahan, have flown on the Blue Origin rocket, which which I think is great.

First of all, I really support the mission.

But people need to understand that goes up and it comes down.

It's about an 11 minute flight.

And although it does go over 50 miles, which technically is SpaceX by the way we define it, it lands at about the same place.

It's a very short flight.

They do get to experience weightlessness, you know, a couple of minutes.

But what NASA is doing and has been doing since the 1960s is going to orbit.

And the difference is orbit.

Here we're talking several hundred miles.

We have a space station now that's up at a 220 to 250 miles.

And we have, you know, usually anywhere between 5 to 11 astronauts up there at any one time.

So when you go to orbit, which is what the space shuttle did and what the Dragon rocket does, now, you go around the Earth, which takes at least 90 minutes to do one orbit.

And the other differences, you need a heat shield to come back, which is a big engineering challenge.

And, more and more commercial company and Blue Origin.

I mentioned them, so I got to be fair to them.

They are developing a rocket for people that will be going to orbit someday.

And there's other companies they're doing that like SpaceX.

And that's what NASA has done for, you know, since the I want to say, since the early 1960s.

Well, in 1995.

Yeah.

Because this is the 30th year of your 30th year.

And that's rotary.

That's right.

When you became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle, what was that like when you when you reached the stars really literally and you looked out the window, tell us what that was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was really for me, it was a dream come true.

I thought it would be an experience where I'd be like, wow, this is great.

I finally made it to space, but it was not like that at all.

Being the first woman pilot, I had to be very focused.

I had to be extremely well trained, knowledgeable.

I had to execute the mission knowing I was the first woman I didn't want to make a mistake because I in the back of my mind, I didn't want people to say, oh look, a woman made a mistake.

I was maybe I got overly concerned about that, but it was something that I thought was important that the first woman do a very good job.

So I worked very hard.

I was very focused.

I was the whole mission.

I was working very hard on not making a mistake and doing the best I possibly could.

I'm happy to say all these years later that I'm happy with my performance on that mission.

And it just goes to show you, the more you work, the more you train.

Whatever it is that you're doing in life, be the best you can be at what you're doing.

And so that was my goal.

So I didn't really have that enjoyable feeling on my first flight, but I did on my second flight because the pressure was off then and I could just be a normal shuttle pilot and enjoy looking out the window and enjoy being in space.

But I would say it was more important for me to show the world that women could do, could do.

The job well.

There was a lot of pressure on you and some people watching to see if you would crack under pressure.

Oh, she's a woman.

She's not going to be able to do it.

So G what was that like?

Well if you take a look at so my first and second flights let's take my first flight.

We had some malfunctions.

We had a couple of jets fail and we had some other things go wrong on the flight.

So we as astronauts are trained to react to problems.

And we have simulators and we, you know, practice engine failures, fires, loss of cabin pressure, like all of these things.

It is amazing, as I mentioned earlier, what practice will do because when we practice these malfunctions in a simulator, it's very realistic.

It really increases your confidence.

You learn about a system when you learn how it fails, and you learn more and more about it.

Obviously you study, but study how it fails.

And I felt when I flew my first.

In fact, all four of my missions, I felt extremely well prepared and extremely confident.

And when I was the commander on my last two missions, I told my crew, you are the best people in the world right now to do this mission.

Nobody else can do what you're doing.

And I tried to help my crew increase their confidence also in not like have second thoughts about what they were doing.

You make the call when you're up there, you're on site.

You're the best trained.

So I think it's not only like about me, but it's about the example I set for my crew and the people around me.

And and the first time you went up the it was a near mer mission.

They called it.

Right.

Because you want I mean, that was the big deal.

You had to rendezvous around the space to me.

So my first mission, one of our major objectives was to it was part of a build up approach.

So we were working with the Russians to eventually build the International Space Station.

So part of that was for us to go to their current Mir space station.

Mir is what the Russians called their space station.

This was back in the 1990s.

So we our job is part of the build up approach was to do a rendezvous in close approach to Mir.

We just went to 30ft.

We didn't dock.

That was the job of the next flight.

And we were the first Americans to see Mir.

We tested the the flying qualities of the shuttle.

We tested our navigation, things like our radar and our sensors.

We tested the communication systems.

And I mean, if something was going to fail, let's not put too much risk into the the actual first docking mission.

So our flight was asked to do this build up approach.

And I'm happy to say that we we were the first Americans to see the Russians space station.

And we were waving out the window to the cosmonauts and making radio calls and taking pictures.

And we were calling it like a, you know, a rendezvous in space.

You dance in the skies, you got the earth below you.

We had the music playing.

So that was actually a that was a trip.

That was that was a mind blowing trip with it.

You know, even later when I my second mission actually docked with the Russian space station.

And I will never, ever have an experience like that again.

It was it was like something you'd see in Star Wars, to be honest with you or in.

Topgun, you didn't communicate with them the way they did in Topgun.

I know them.

Yeah, well, there's a lot of a lot of lingo on the radio, like people wouldn't always understand because you've got acronyms and abbreviations and of course you've got other languages going on.

And so sometimes people like, they don't listen to the radio chatter.

It just sounds cool.

Yeah.

The first one was discovery, the second 1 in 1997.

You were a pilot again, right?

For honor.

Atlantis.

Is that the Atlantic?

That's right.

Yes.

And, so that time you said you got to relax.

So tell us this time, I want to know what you saw when you looked out the window.

Yeah.

So my second mission was very different from my first, I had flown.

See, normally an astronaut that goes up on their first flight, they worry how they're going to feel because you get the fluid shift, you tend to get stomach awareness.

You feel a little bit sick and you're disoriented because there's no gravity.

So I was concerned about that on my first flight.

But I got through that period.

Normally in a couple days you get adapted.

So my second flight, I didn't have to worry about what's going to happen with, you know, the human body.

Am I going to be okay?

I knew I was going to be okay and we had no malfunctions on the Atlantis, so I had more time to look out the window.

And one of the things that I honestly think that space tourism is going to be extremely successful someday, once the cost comes down.

One of the experiences that you have is you could put your face up against the window and stretch out your arms, looking down at the earth or looking up at the earth because you're obviously in orbit and you feel like an angel flying over the planet, and you can see the Earth is round.

I have people tell me the Earth is flat.

No, I'm 100% sure that the Earth is round.

Are they still say.

Well, some.

Yeah, some people still think the earth is flat.

It's amazing the conspiracy theories that are out there, but the earth is round.

You go around it once every 90 minutes.

The earth is blue and white.

Most of the land is usually covered with clouds.

So you look down and you say, wow, we live on a water planet.

It's blue and white and it's beautiful.

And then you'll see deserts occasionally like Australia or the, you know, Northern Africa, the Sahara desert, just so bright, shiny gets the darkness of space.

And it's it really it kind of changes, at least for me.

It changed the way I see myself in my life, realizing that every little detail in your life is not that important.

You know, things like, oh, I'm stuck in traffic or, you know, maybe I lost something.

I mean, all those little things that distract us every day that, you know, make us frustrated.

I said, wait a minute.

I've been to space.

We are living on the outside of a ball, and gravity keeps our feet stuck to the surface.

And that ball is turning in.

It's revolving around the sun, and we are tiny little dots on the surface.

And I think it makes my everyday attitude a little more.

I'm going to say calm and a little more, I would say concerned with bigger things than all the little things that used to bother me.

They still do bother me, but I not as much as they used to.

And the second time that that you went up, you delivered supplies to the mirror station, right?

Right.

So my second flight, we docked with the Mir space station, and that mission, which was in May of 1997, was after there was a big fire on the Mir space station, which we almost lost.

There were three astronauts on board.

They almost lost their lives because the whole space station filled up with smoke, and fortunately, they were able to put the fire out and clean the air and recover from that.

We went up intact after that.

So we were, you know, all focused on, you know, things like putting out fires in space.

Then after we left, there was a collision of a Russian resupply vehicle with one with the Mir space station, and they developed a leak.

They were leaking air.

And we were the mission in between those two.

And by the way, they were able to find that leak and close it off.

But really thinking about my second mission, we had refocused on things like, what are some of the severe malfunctions that can happen on the space station?

How are we going to be prepared for that?

Think of yourself as a fireman or, you know, somebody, you know, maybe that works.

You know, window, in a hospital or something like that.

And how were you going to take care of a space station or a human who gets hurt up in space?

So we were really focused on that.

On my second mission, as well as doing the resupply, I mean, the core mission, the reason we were, I think we launched in the first place was to do the resupply so our astronauts could do their experiments in space.

But we had refocused on space as a dangerous business, and we need to be ready to respond to any malfunctions that can happen up there.

And in 1999, you were the commander, the first female commander of a space shuttle mission.

And that was a biggie.

I'm not only talking in size because that was the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

And, but that was pretty heavy.

How in the world did you manage to get it up there?

On my third flight, we took up.

Yeah, it was the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is one of NASA's Great Observatories.

Now Chandra is still flying.

It's still up there.

It's almost 100% working.

Great.

It's taking data.

Chandra observes the universe in X-rays.

And so it will and maneuver around.

It will aim at different objects out there.

You know, black holes, quasars, pulsars, different types of galaxies.

And they those strange astronomical objects emit X-rays.

So Chandra looks at those X-rays.

It is registered like a picture.

And that data is sent to the Earth for scientists to study.

What is this universe that we live in?

Where did it come from?

Where is it going?

How is it affecting us here on earth?

And so I was really excited to have that mission, whether I was the commander or not.

So I got really involved with the astronomy community, and I encourage young people to study science.

And I think this is one of the things about my career, having the experience working with astronomers, that helps me talk to young people about curiosity.

You know, what?

What is this universe that we live in?

So to me, that was the most exciting thing about my third flight.

Now, I also happen to be the first woman commander, so I had that pressure on me again.

The world is watching.

Don't make a mistake.

Make sure that this mission is is perfect as it can possibly be.

And although we did have some minor things, I think overall the mission went well and we achieved our objective.

So I was able to come back and, I want to say start getting in line for my next mission.

After that mission, you went to the white House, and Hillary Clinton was the first lady at the time.

And she said that you took a giant leap for us.

Do you remember that quote?

Yes, I do.

That visit to the white House was I want to say that was one of the few times in my life that I was close to panicking because really, they I had to go up there and make a speech and I walked into this.

It was we had this meeting in the Roosevelt Room, which is just outside of the Oval Office, and I had an opportunity to meet, President Clinton in the in Mrs.

Clinton.

And when I walked out of the Oval Office and into the Roosevelt Room, there's this huge bank of cameras and lights in all of these journalists and reporters that I recognized in the room with their little notebooks.

And I was like, I'm I'm not ready for this.

This is what I do.

This is not why, you know, I fly airplanes, I'm an astronaut.

I don't speak to the press.

This is.

But I had to cut like they okay, today.

Just be the first woman commander, and tomorrow you can go home and be Eileen.

So just jump into the role.

So I got up there, I made my little speech, I answered some questions and went home and went back into my little astronaut role.

But it is it is tough to get, from what I hear, one of the biggest fears that people have is public speaking.

And I totally get it.

I understand that because that was always me, but I think I've learned over time it's my dad always told me, put yourself in the other person's position.

And that worked.

I put myself in their position.

What do they don't want to see the first woman commander go up there and be nervous and not know what to say.

Just put yourself in their position, do your job and you can go back and yeah, go back and be Eileen some other time.

And you mentioned your dad and in your book, Through the Glass Ceiling to the stars, you do talk about your childhood in Elmira, New York.

And it was not the ideal childhood.

Your father was an alcoholic.

Your mother was a struggling, woman.

And, financially, you for a time lived in low income housing.

So how does one go from that to reaching the stars?

Well, I think living in the United States in the opportunities that we have here is, I mean, I I've traveled around the world flying, see, 140 once in the military and I've seen, the poverty in other countries.

And, you know, we really do need to help people around the world because I, I really believe in helping other people and sharing what we have.

But I, you know, growing up, it was hard.

But I think I learned so much from my, my mother and my father how to have a budget.

Don't spend money that you don't have.

We were on food stamps.

We were on we called it welfare back then.

We had the Medicaid.

And my mother always talked about money because you can't have cheese on that hamburger because it was $0.05 and we couldn't afford it.

And so I, I still kind of carry that with me today.

And my dad, yes, he was an alcoholic.

He was a big drinker.

And you never knew what you were going to get.

He, when he came home.

Where are you going to get your dad.

And where are you going to get some person that wasn't your dad that you were scared of.

And, you know, part of it was, I really learned to get into my dad's head and understand as much as I could his alcoholism to help me understand human nature.

So I don't think we have to take every, every bad thing in life that happens to us.

We need to learn from it.

And I also think, and again, my dad said, put yourself in the other person's position and try to see things the way they see them.

I think that's really helped me cope with things that I'm having trouble with, because it helps me be more, able to help other people.

And I think it really helped being a shuttle commander or commander, whether, you know, you're maybe your squadron commander in the Air Force or a wing commander or something like that, you need to know your people.

You need to understand where they're coming from and the problems that they're having.

And you don't need to, I want to say be a, there's a word for it when you, you kind of help other people stay in their problems.

You want to help them get out of their problems.

So I think that's what I learned.

And despite all of that, you raised money for your own flight lessons.

You knew that's what you wanted to do.

Right?

Right.

So I knew my parents.

If I told them I wanted flying lessons, they would have just I mean, they wouldn't have even laughed at me.

They would have just like, what are you talking about?

We don't have money for that.

So I got when I was 16, I went out and I started part time jobs.

I saved my money.

I wasn't buying a lot of clothes or I wasn't spending it.

I just put it in the bank.

And by the time I was 20 years old, I had enough money for a I want to say at that point I had enough money to get a license, which back in those days cost about $1,000.

And I went to the ER.

I overcame my fear of going to the airport.

I was a little worried they were going to tell me because I was a girl.

They wouldn't teach me to fly, but I don't know where I got that idea from.

But I eventually went to the airport and they said, so we called a fixed base operator FBO up at the Elmira Airport and they're like, oh, we'd love to teach you how to fly.

You know, we have Cessna, we have Pipers, we have Datadog.

They go over the airplanes, we have instructors, we have simulators.

Here's the ground school.

And so I handed my money over and I learned to fly.

And it was great.

I was 20 years old, and I soloed a Cessna 150.

And then you started in community college, went on to Syracuse and then Stanford.

And so it can be done.

It can.

Be.

Yeah, and I do I am a big proponent of community colleges.

I went two years, I loved it, I was able to live at home, help my mother.

I was able to work.

I mean, I worked, I saved my money while I was, a student, full time student at community college.

So community college is a great place to be.

There's there all around the country.

We have one here at the, you know, San Antonio College.

And you can either, prepare yourself for four year school or you can get a degree in some kind of, you know, skill that you're interested in.

So I encourage young people to look into that.

All right.

I've got to ask you, is there extraterrestrial life out there?

Oh, actually, Liz, that is the most common question I get.

People want to know.

Are, you know, is there extraterrestrial life?

Are are we being visited?

There's the answer to that on many different levels.

First of all, I believe that there is life somewhere in the universe.

There's got to be.

If you look at how big the universe is, you can't even you can't even conceive of how big it is in all the planets that we're discovering out there in other, other stars in our galaxy.

I actually do not think that any aliens are visiting Earth, and I have read the books and I've studied this.

Those things that you see, like you'll say, oh, where that thing looks like a, you know, it's a UFO or whatever they call them today.

I think that there's energy in the Earth's atmosphere that we don't understand yet.

Like if you look at a carrier group in the Navy, they've got all kinds of, I want to say energy out there.

And, you know, their radios and navigation and their airplanes.

And I think that these energy's just reacting somehow in ways that we don't understand.

Recently, we've discovered something called sprites, which are these huge energy bursts that you can see from space that just, like shoot up from the Earth into space, you can look it up.

They're called sprites.

And there's some amazing pictures.

I don't think we're being visited by aliens.

NASA is not hiding aliens, and I know everyone is disappointed when I say that, but but, you know, stay tuned.

Maybe someday we'll, we'll be living in the world of Star Wars, and we'll find people out there somewhere or something.

Like people somewhere out there in the universe.

Tom Hanks gave you a quote that's on the cover of your book.

What a read.

This is what he said.

And of course, he was in Apollo 13, Academy Award winning movie.

Are you Friends with Tom Hanks or?

Well, I didn't have friends.

With him, but I was.

I actually was emailing him, which I thought was really cool.

I sent him what we had written of the book so far, and I mean, within like three days, he sent me back a quote.

I know him from Apollo 13.

I had several conversations with them at various points while they were shooting the movie.

And you know, he is a genuine person.

He's a really good guy and he's really interested in the in what he's doing.

For example, when he was playing Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, you know, they were the mission on the way to the moon, their oxygen tank exploded, and NASA basically saved the lives of of those three astronauts.

And great story.

They made the movie in the mid 1990s and Tom Hanks got really involved.

He wanted to get actually into the mind of an astronaut.

They were on the what the the Zero-G airplane shooting those scenes where they were floating.

They were actually in zero gravity when they shot that movie.

Eileen Collins, thank you so much for being with us on San Antonio Files.

Well, thanks, Liz, I really enjoyed our conversation.

It was great to be here.

Eileen Collins, a proud San Antonio resident, a role model for young people interested in aviation, engineering, math, science, technology.

And thank you for taking flight and reaching for the stars with San Antonio files on your public television station KLRN.