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Astronaut Eileen Collins, NASA’s First Female Shuttle Commander

The headshot image of Monika Luabeya

Monika Luabeya

Jul 23, 2024
Image Article
Two astronauts, one male (back) and one female (front) float inside the space shuttle. The woman in the front smiles at the camera while holding a spiral bound notebook in her right hand. She is wearing a blue polo shirt and blue pants with utility pockets on the thigh, as well as a gold watch on her left wrist. Her short brown hair floats upward.
NASA

Astronaut Eileen Collins, STS-93 commander, looks through a checklist on the space shuttle Columbia’s middeck in this July 1999 image. Collins was the first female shuttle commander.

Collins graduated in 1979 from Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance AFB, Oklahoma, where she was a T-38 instructor pilot until 1982. She continued her career as an instructor pilot of different aircraft until 1989. She was selected for the astronaut program while attending the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, California, which she graduated from in 1990. Collins became an astronaut in 1991 and over the course of four spaceflights, logged over 872 hours in space. She retired from NASA in May 2006.

Image credit: NASA