I was reading Junior Scholastic magazine in fourth grade, reading about the Gemini astronauts.

They were all men.

Yes.

But for some reason, at that age, it didn't stop me from wanting to become an astronaut.

I thought, Well, they just don't have a woman yet.

I'm going to do it.

Discover how this truly inspirational woman turned big childhood dreams into a reality that hugely impacted the world of space exploration.

This week on the A-list retired shuttle commander Colonel Eileen Collins.

Colonel Eileen Collins is no stranger to exploring uncharted territory over the course of her 16 year career as an astronaut.

She's logged over 872 hours in space and in the process cemented her role as a true pioneer in the world of aviation.

Her contributions have frequently led to comparisons to the likes of Amelia Earhart.

And it's no wonder at 23 years old, Collins became the U.S. Air Force's first ever female flight instructor, which only set the stage for a string of firsts for this hardworking pilot.

In 1995, she made history as the first woman to ever pilot a space shuttle.

And then again in 1999, as a shuttle missions first ever female commander.

Since retiring from NASA in 2006, Collins has made it her priority to share her incredible experiences with students around the country.

And that is exactly how I met up with her here at the UTC Challenger Center as she spoke with students from the Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy.

Almost to meet you, Eileen.

Colonel Collins, thank you so much for being on the A-list.

We're thrilled to have you.

Thank you.

It's great to be here.

Now you're in Chattanooga because you are going to be speaking at the Odyssey event to benefit the Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy.

And I know that the women and young women in the audience will love your message.

But why do you feel it is important specifically to tailor that message to women?

Well, I think it's important to the women, to the young women themselves.

But it's also important to our country.

And this is something that I'm passionate about, is looking at the future where our country is going and the educational level of the upcoming generation.

The country needs engineers.

We need people that are technical, that understand science and understand these concepts and technology.

It's important for the country and we have to tap into every young person regardless of whether they're a man or a woman or where they grew up or what they look like.

Everybody has different talents, and I think that all young people need to be exposed to these tough courses math, science, engineering, technology.

Not be afraid of them.

If they don't get A or B or a good grade, not to be scared away because these things take a long time to learn.

So we need to nurture that and we need to make sure, especially with young women who, you know, society doesn't always encourage them to go into engineering and science.

And I think we need to change that because we need to tap into that brainpower.

So I feel very passionate about this.

And it's no surprise that we would want to have this interview right here at UTC's Challenger Center, where young people, you know, throughout the year get to have that experience and interact with people who love space, but more importantly, who value space education.

How important is that even today, even in 2012 and beyond, to focus our energy not just on STEM education, but on space education?

Well, space education, you know, learning about space operations as well as space history, space law, space physics, astronomy, astrophysics, just the essence of the universe.

It inspires people, young and old, to learn the basics math, science and engineering.

So I think that our schools should integrate and they do integrate the space education to inspire the student to want to learn numbers and to want to learn chemistry and biology and physics.

You know, you can study electricity in light, in motion, in physics, and all of that applies when you study launching rockets into space, building robots, learning how orbits work, how do you rendezvous in space?

How do you build a space station?

How do you operate the International Space Station?

There is a lot of challenges.

And one of the other things is creativity.

These young people that we want to see come into the space business need to have very open and creative minds, because we need a lot of original thinkers to help us solve problems that we just don't have on Earth, that we've never had these kind of problems before, like cleaning up low-Earth orbit.

How do you protect a space station from solar flares?

How do you for people to go into medicine?

How do you protect the human body in space from, for example, radiation in microgravity and losing calcium out of your bone similar to osteoporosis?

So all of these problems that we have to deal with if we're going to live in space for long periods of time, send humanity away from the earth to live in other places.

The problems have to be solved if we want to survive.

So we need creative people to choose space careers in this country.

I'd like to keep the United States as a leader in space.

And it's just it's just so very exciting to me.

And we're only taking baby steps now.

So do any of you think you might want to be an astronaut someday?

You do?

You can.

You can be an astronaut if you want.

You just have to work with other Americans.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's really fun.

That's one of the fun parts of the job is the floating.

But the hard part is doing all the training.

The flight itself actually isn't.

Isn't that hard because you prepared for it so much.

But any of you could be an astronaut if you wanted it.

You just have to work real hard for it.

And Colonel Collins is certainly an example of the success that comes from hard work.

Growing up in Elmira, New York.

She developed a fascination with flying from a very young age and by the fourth grade had already set her sights on becoming a pilot.

Though her family faced economic hardships.

Her parents support of her dream was unwavering.

And with their encouragement, Eileen started saving up for flying lessons When she began her first job at age 16.

The work ethic instilled in her at such a young age eventually enabled her to pay her own way through four years of college and later earn two master's degrees.

In the spirit it took to pursue a dream that at the time was reserved only for men would set Eileen on the path toward a truly remarkable journey.

When did you first learn to fly?

I learned to fly.

I was 19.

I will say I was I was 19 when I first stepped foot in any airplane of any kind.

You had never flown.

I had never.

Even as a.

Passenger, had never been a passenger, never flown in a commercial airliner.

I will say I grew up you know, my family was a great family.

We didn't have a lot of money.

So I wasn't able to take flying lessons and I didn't play golf or anything like that.

When I was younger.

So when I was 19, my mom and I went on a trip and I remember looking out the window.

This is really cool stuff and thinking about how I had always wanted to fly since I was a little kid sitting on my dad's foot of his car.

And the following summer I was 20.

I took my first flying lessons and I had saved up enough money through part time jobs.

I had saved up $1,000 in high school, odd jobs I had in high school, college.

And over the summer, it took all the courage in my body to walk up to that airport and go into the it was called a field fixed base operator and say, Can can I learn how to fly?

I thought they laughed at me because I was a girl, but they didn't.

They're like, Yeah, come on in.

We'd love to have you.

And I gave them a big fat check.

All the money that I had worked so hard for, but I knew what I wanted to do.

And they gave me a ground school simulators and I flew.

And I eventually got my license with the FAA.

And I eventually went off and flew foot, flew in the Air Force.

Now, when you were in the Air Force, you were still part of a pretty small cadre of women who were pilots at the time.

How did that affect your stay in the Air Force?

How did it affect the camaraderie between you and your fellow pilots?

Know, did you did you feel distinguished as a woman pilot by your peers, by the people around you, or was it finally coming of age where this was acceptable profession?

Well, interesting question.

1974, the Navy took their first women pilots into pilot training.

In 1976, the Air Force brought their first women in.

I came in in 78, so I was in about the third or fourth group to go through Air Force pilot training.

And I know the first women had it kind of rough because they were going into a not just a career field, but really a tradition of flying because pretty much back to World War One in the military, all male.

And when I came in in 78, now I was in the first group of women at my base.

So we were breaking new ground there.

And this was in a airforce base in I'm sorry, Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma.

Most of the men were happy to have us there.

There was a subset that didn't want us.

And a little story.

I remember my first day, I was in my flight suit and I went to the commissary, the grocery store, and I was purchasing some food to take back to my room.

And the lady that was checking me out said, Are you one of those new women pilots?

I'm like my flight suit.

I'm like, Yeah.

And I was 21 years old.

And she said, you know, the wives don't want you here.

And I thought, man said, the guys don't want us here.

And now the wives don't want us here either.

And I said, Well, why?

And she said, Because they don't want you going cross-country with their husbands.

I said, Okay.

Thank you for telling me that.

And I went back to my room and I thought about it.

I said, you know, I'm going to get to meet the wives and I want them to know me.

And I'm not here to find a husband.

I'm not here to steal a husband.

I'm here because I want to fly.

And I ended up becoming friends with a lot of the wives.

And I think it just took some time.

Know, when we walked in, that was, I think, of a expectation of what the women were going to be like.

But we were just maybe a small cross-section of college women college graduates.

The difference with us is that we wanted to fly and we want to serve our country.

We wanted to be in the military.

And and so I think we were treated very fairly.

But yet it was it was difficult to go through pilot training in itself.

But going through pilot training, living in a fishbowl was even harder.

So I just my rule, which I live live to this rule today, is always focus on the mission and all these little distractions that are coming along, like snide remarks in the hallway or not being invited to an event because they don't know what to do with you or, you know, those things happen.

You just have to follow orders, focus on the mission, and try not to let these little distractions bring you down.

Focusing on the mission ended up being a successful tactic for the young pilot, despite being one of only four women in her class of 320.

And after only a year of training, Collins became the U.S. Air Force's first female flight instructor.

She taught flying at bases in Oklahoma, California and Colorado, as well as teaching mathematics at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

By the age of 32, she had logged over 1500 hours of flight time and became the second woman ever to be accepted to the air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base.

With such an impressive resume, it seemed a natural progression that in 1991, Eileen was selected for NASA's astronaut program.

What was it like transitioning between the Air Force and NASA's when, you know, how did you make that decision?

And then what was it like and how long did it take for you to become a true astronaut?

Well, if you're a military officer and you want to be an astronaut, you have to apply to your respective service.

So I applied to the Air Force.

I met a board for the names to NASA and NASA's Alexis, through the interview process, you go through a seven day medical test, which is not fun and when I was selected by NASA, I would say for me the transition was very easy because a lot of the way the astronaut corps trained and studied and worked together was very similar to what we had done in the military working together.

So for me, the transition was pretty easy.

I enjoyed the people that I met and I was just in love with the mission, you know, flying in space.

And I just didn't think it was going fast enough.

I thought we needed to, you know, space shuttle goes into low-Earth orbit.

We have a space station there now, but we need to get back to the moon.

We need to get on to Mars.

So I'm always thinking about how can we fly the shuttle so we can better prepare for when we leave low-Earth orbit and go back to and go to farther, more distant locations.

So the transition was easy.

I was just in love with my job.

It was just the best job in the world.

What was your first mission like?

Okay, my first mission was on Discovery, and we were the first Americans to see the Russian space station Mir, which means peace.

So the Russians had had their space station up there for quite some time, maybe seven years or so.

And our country and Russia had decided that we were going to do a joint program where the shuttle would fly to the Mir space station and we would dock open the hatches and transfer logistics science experiments and astronauts.

So there were seven American astronauts.

We did a long duration flight on Mir.

I think another part of your question, not really mission oriented as much, is the human side of it.

I was very confident on my first mission.

You always expect that your heart's going to be beating and you're going to be scared.

And you know what's going to happen.

But I was very confident because of so much training.

And I had worked at Kennedy Space Center.

I had worked in mission control.

So I felt like I could handle just about anything that was going to happen.

And that's the way you want the astronauts to be when they fly.

Full of confidence in it, really well trained.

And I think I was so mission oriented for the first day or so, I sort of forgot to enjoy it.

But my flight engineer was sitting behind me.

We had been up in space for 8 minutes and Mike Mike Foale said to me, Eileen, stop working so hard for just a minute.

Look out the window.

This is your first sunrise from space.

So I looked out the window.

I was shutting down the APUs and I was shutting down the main engines and looked out the window and I saw the curvature of the earth and the band of blue and white and a little bit of red.

And the sun was coming up and I thought, oh my gosh, the earth is round, the earth is round.

Well, you know, of course the earth is round.

You learned that in school.

But when you see it for the first time with your own eyes, though, we are living on a ball.

The people are living on this ball and that really changes your thinking about the planet in the earth that we live on in that you can see that the atmosphere is so thin.

It's like an apple skin on an apple.

And to me that's just amazing.

And we go through life every day thinking, How is my hair look and what am I going to eat for lunch today?

And that guy just cut me off on the road while I'm driving to work.

And that stuff is meaningless.

It is.

I mean, who cares about the latest celebrity or what's in the magazine?

He literally says Global meaningless.

Yeah.

And you really change astronauts really change the way they see life in general and the universe that we live in.

There's so much more to this life that we're living.

And if people this is why STEM is important.

If people can get out of their little everyday problems that I know they're important to us, but don't spend like 24 hours a day stressing out over something that tomorrow really won't make that much of a difference.

It is this global view, perhaps unique to astronauts that has enabled Colonel Collins to remain humble despite a long list of history making accomplishments.

And though her achievements have made her a symbol for women in her field.

As always, Colonel Collins remained dedicated to a focus on mission.

Her second flight was in 1997, when she piloted the Atlantis to dock at the Russian space station Mir.

But it was in 1999.

On her third trip into space that Colonel Collins made history once again.

In 1999, you became the first female space shuttle commander.

When that happened, did you have a sense of the gravity, no pun intended, of that of that decision, of that move?

Well, you see, that goes back to being focused on the mission.

When I was assigned is is the commander of US 93.

I was the first woman to ever do that.

It was announced at the White House and Bill Clinton was president.

So the president in the first lady announces in the Roosevelt Room just outside of the Oval Office.

And I walked into that room.

I had to make a speech.

So the president spoke, the first lady spoke, and then I was to get up and speak.

So of course, I knew the gravity.

This is kind of a big deal.

As I walked into that room, a feeling of panic came over me because I'm really not respect.

Then I wasn't a public speaker.

I'm a pilot and I'm I work to be the best pilot I can be the best astronaut.

I can be that real big into public speaking.

In this feeling, a panic came over me.

And that's really a physical feeling.

Like you feel the sweat and you feel the numbness.

And I mean, all these famous journalists were out there and people I see on TV and Sally Ride was there and and I stopped myself and said, Wait a minute, Eileen, you're not Eileen.

You're the woman commander.

Just get out there and do it.

And that worked.

So since then, I've learned to jump in and out of my jumpsuit, so to speak, when I go home or when I'm with my friends, I'm just Eileen.

And when I'm working, I'm with the outside world.

We say I just kind of put on the face of the woman commander.

And so I've learned to kind of go back and forth.

And I don't know, for some reason that helps.

I always go back to being focused on the mission, though, because to get too distracted by outside events like being on the talk shows and flying to New York and flying to Los Angeles and being in the parades and doing, I mean, that can just make you think you're somebody that you aren't.

You know, I that can go to your head after a while.

So I have I have a little bit rejected that life of being out in the public.

I do enough of it for good causes because I think that I've had an experience that I need to share, but I also try to keep myself grounded and keep the human side of myself from being the person that I am versus becoming somebody that I'm not.

In 2005, Colonel Collins commanded her final mission into space aboard the Discovery.

It was the first space shuttle launch to take place since the disastrous voyage of the Columbia in 2003, in which all seven astronauts on board were killed.

As the shuttle disintegrate faded upon reentry into the earth's atmosphere, one of Discovery's primary missions during its two week stay in space was to test new safety measures that had been designed by NASA after the Columbia tragedy.

It seems fitting that a journey so significant to the future of space exploration was Colonel Collins last and in 2006, she retired.

These days, Eileen spends most of her time being a mom, but she will always look back on her time as an astronaut with the fondest of memories.

When you look back on your career, what was the best thing about being an astronaut?

Oh, by far.

Flying in space.

Being in space is so wonderful.

The feeling that your body has.

Well, going through the launch is kind of a kick in the pants.

It's.

It's a race to space.

I mean, you beat your body's being hurled out into the beyond the stratosphere.

You know, I've been to space three times your weight, so a £10 weight would weigh £30.

I mean, it's how fast you're accelerating the engine shut off and you're instantly in microgravity and things start floating.

You know, you take your pin out and it floats in front of you and the dust is floating.

You immediately start losing things, you know, Hey, with my pen, go.

But that can be frustrating.

But the human body, it feels so natural being in space takes a couple of days to get used to it.

And it can make you lazy because you're not working against gravity, but it feels so natural and it's so fun and you.

Got paid to do it.

Yes.

Yes, we did.

And I hope to see our space program do much better now that the shuttle's gone.

The shuttle was great, but right now we we're not launching people.

We can do better than that.

And I want to see the government continue to operate a rocket and space to do the things that private industry isn't ready to do.

And I want to see private industry be successful in their flights to low-Earth orbit.

And, you know, for whatever reasons they're doing it for, but also for space tourism, which I think is going to be very successful.

Well, I have learned I've gotten my small dose of space education today.

And if I had to make a bumper sticker based on your your words of wisdom, it would definitely be always focus on the mission and I'll try.

Yes, it's very true.

It's true for everybody.

No matter what you do, we will.

Thank you so much, Colonel Collins.

All right.

Thank you