Col. Eileen Collins, USAF (Ret.)

Eileen Collins

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Show notes

In this interview with Astronaut Pilot Eileen Collins, she talks about her path, from her childhood in Elmira, New York, through community college and ROTC, to Air Force Flight Training, Instructing, a combat mission in Grenada, Stanford, and Test Pilot School, to becoming the first female, and mother, NASA Space Shuttle pilot and mission commander. 

Transcript

Eilen Collins Interview

[00:00:00] Liz: Hello and welcome. I’m Liz Booker, Literary Aviatrix, and I’m thrilled to talk with the author of the November 2023 Aviatrix Book Club discussion book, Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars, the story of the first American woman to command a space mission.

Colonel Eileen Collins, welcome.

[00:00:30] Eileen: Hi it’s great to be with you.

[00:00:32] Liz: Oh my gosh, I have so much that I want to talk to you about. Before we get started, though, for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to read the book and who maybe doesn’t know who you are, can you give us a synopsis?

[00:00:43] Eileen: Here’s my book, and I originally called it Farther, Faster, Higher, but we ended up changing the name.

My publisher liked Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars, and I think that it sort of, I want to say, describes what the book is about. It’s really about my career and I didn’t write the book because I wanted to talk about me. I’m not trying to get myself more publicity or more fame or fortune or anything like that.

If I did, I probably would have written the book 15 years ago. I hesitated writing the book because I’m not one of those people that likes to promote myself. And I thought time was going by and I was thinking the Space Shuttle Program, which, by the way, the shuttle was retired in the year 2011, the Space Shuttle Program was just an absolutely fantastic story.

Not just the shuttle itself, but all the people that worked on the program, the astronauts, the engineers, the designers, the flight controllers I could go on and on. Our secretaries, our janitors technicians, everybody that worked in the program. What a great story. And people were retiring and eventually starting to pass away.

And I thought, this needs to be written down. And an author, Jonathan Ward, contacted me. Back in 2019 or early 2020 and said, I’ll write a book with you and let’s do it on your space career. And I said no, I don’t want to do that. I’m too busy and I’m raising 2 kids. I’ve got all these things going on.

And then the pandemic hit in March of 2020 and about 3 weeks went by and we were locked down and all my travel stopped. I was doing most of my work online. I had more free time. My youngest son had gone off to college and I said I think I’m going to call Jonathan back and let’s do the book. So I really think it happened because of the pandemic, but as I was mentioning earlier, there was that initial motivation to tell the story of the space shuttle program from an astronaut’s point of view.

At that point in time, there were very few books there was a handful, but very few books on from astronauts on the space shuttle program and there were, there was only one by a woman. And I thought I think there’s really a, there’s a gap here. There’s a need, there’s a void to fill.

So we started writing the book and I would write a chapter and I’d send it to Jonathan and he would do more research. We made sure that everything in the book was accurate. And then we decided it would cover my life from growing up in small town Elmira, New York. Why I joined the Air Force, what my Air Force career was like I was in the first class of women to go through pilot training at my base in Oklahoma ever been training pilots since 1944.

And then in 1978, I was in the first class of women to attend that base. There were 4 of us. I told that story. Flying C 141s being a test pilot the leadership lessons I learned is I was the commander with senior ranking officer of my class at test pilot school, learned so much there that I wrote about what astronaut selection is like, the interview was like, the training and the four missions that I flew.

And finally towards the end of my career, the Columbia accident happened. That was in 2003, and that was just a horrible honestly horrific time in my life, losing seven friends. And as much as I don’t want to revisit that part of my life because it was so painful I said we, this needs to be…

This needs to be written down. We don’t want to be repeating the mistakes of the past. So I wrote a chapter on the Columbia accident, the return to flight period. I was the commander of the flight after the Columbia accident, so I had a chapter on the return to flight and the Columbia mission. And throughout the book, I weave in leadership lessons, mistakes that I made.

I’m not afraid to admit the mistakes I made. I talked about process of dealing with mistakes. Dealing with decisions, dealing with conflict and all things like that happened throughout my career.

The book got kind of long. We had to edit it down. We had to keep it at 90, 000 words or less per the publisher, but there were so many lessons in there. I probably have enough material for another book someday. If I have the time and the energy to write another one, there’s probably enough material to do that.

Oh, and one other thing about writing the book, not just telling the story of the space shuttle program from a human’s point of view, But also my service in the military. And I’m hoping that young people read the book, also high school and college age students can read the book and see what it’s like to be in the military because I had a wonderful experience in the Air Force.

The people I met, the challenges, the travel, the the flying even if you’re not a pilot, the careers that you can have in the military are so challenging and I want to say meaningful. You feel like you’re really making a contribution. And doing something important and give young people that perspective of what it’s like to be in the military as well as to work in the space program.

So that I could go on and on, but that’s kind of in a nutshell top level. The reason I wrote the book and I’m at this point. I’m glad that I did. I’m still out doing book signings and marketing the book and there’s still a lot of interest in it. So it’s sort of become a passion of mine.

[00:06:55] Liz: Oh, that’s so wonderful.

You’ve answered so many questions that I get into in the writing portion of this. And your humility is so endearing. I just, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be you and for you to go places and be treated like an absolute, like royalty, like a rock star, like a movie star. But you’ve done from my perspective, so many more important things.

And I don’t want to make it even more awkward by fangirling you. But. I, you are such a huge icon for those of us who grew up dreaming of being an astronaut and astronaut pilot. And so we all look up to you. So, your book does two things. It does this incredible job of providing young people a roadmap and inspiration, but also, for those of us who were little girls and had the same dreams that you had and who looked at the space program in awe and wonder and were inspired to go in that direction at least, some of us got farther than others, but we get to experience those dreams vicariously through you.

So it’s not only the young people that you’re inspiring.

It’s those of us older people who looked at the space program, were inspired by it as children. Thank you for telling your story. It was long overdue from my perspective, and I know that you had many people tell you that you should write it.

I would love to go kind of chronologically through the book and just hit some highlights from each part of the story, your life and the space program and everything that you highlighted. But I want to gush about two things first and foremost.

First you open the book with your first mission, your launch. And this is a concept that I talk about quite a bit on, about our books because I get emotional. I’m so passionate about flying and our history.

And when I was in my master of fine arts for writing, I had a girlfriend who did her thesis on when readers cry and it’s typically she found when the character gets what they need. And so you open the book and we don’t know you yet. We know you generally, your accomplishment and your story, but because we’re living vicariously through you, those of us who dreamt of doing this, you had me crying at the opening because you’re describing this incredible experience of your first launch.

And the other thing I wanted to gush about really quickly is the frequency and the emphasis with which you mentioned how reading impacted and inspired you toward flight. And you do that several times in the book and you hammer it again at the end this idea of reading. And obviously I’m here promoting books that feature women in aviation for this very story.

So you start with this, what I was surprised to find was your humble beginnings as a child. Tell us a little bit about your childhood.

[00:10:22] Eileen: I grew up in Elmira, New York. And one of the special things about Elmira is it’s the location of the National Soaring Museum, Gliders Harris Hill. I went to summer camp adjacent to the glider field at Harris Hill. And I remember as a kid, this was age 8 through age 12 watching the gliders fly overhead. My family didn’t have the money to get me flying lessons. I would never even ask because I knew what the answer would be, but I would watch the gliders. And also my dad would take us to the glider field and we’d park the car and watch the glide, the tow plane, tow the gliders out over Chemung Valley.

And watch them fly overhead. We watched them separate and the gliders flew. They were so quiet. They were like birds and I was wondering what would it be like to be up there. So I think maybe that was 1 of the initial. Maybe the bit was set in my brain and I don’t remember at a very young age saying I want to be a pilot.

That came later and you’ve mentioned books and I think it was really reading books. My mother took us to the Steele Memorial Library on Church Street in Elmira and I would check out, I’d take home a stack of books. And at some point, probably in my preteen or teen years, I found the section on flying, and I started reading books about airplanes and pilots.

And they had these dramatic titles. I’d pull them off the shelf. Fate is the Hunter. God is my Co Pilot. The Stars at Noon, which is a book about Jackie Cochran, who started the Women Air Force Service pilots. You might remember Jackie Cochran was the first woman to go faster than the speed of sound. She was a friend of Chuck Yeager’s but she came from nothing and down in the deep south, she was very poor.

I don’t think her parents were present in her life, but she went on to really become rich and famous. And so I read about her and many of the other women that you don’t often hear about Louise Thayden, Ruth Law. I could go on and on and name more women pilots that had books written on them, but if there wasn’t a book on them, it was hard.

Nancy Love was the other one I was thinking of. Nancy Love worked with Jackie Cochran to start the Women Air Force Service Pilots, and of course, Amelia Earhart. There was a lot written on her, but I think it was really the books that made me decide I wanted to be a pilot. And then having seen the airplanes fly, I While I was at summer camp, made it a little more realistic for me, neither one of my parents were pilots started maybe festering in the back of my mind and high school.

And then in college, when I saw that the Air Force had opened pilot training to women for the 1st time ever in the history of the Air Force, it was 1976. 10 women were selected. is part of a test program, and they were sent to Arizona, a base called Williams Air Force Base near Phoenix, Arizona. And I was reading about them in the magazines and newspapers.

There was no social media back in those days, so you had to actually go looking to find this information. And then the second class of women was selected after that. And that was the following year, 1977. Then in 1978, I was a senior in college in ROTC. I had an assignment to go, believe it or not, I was going to work as a computer systems design engineer at, off at Air Force Base.

I was going to do missile targeting as a 21 year old newly commissioned second lieutenant in Strategic Air Command. That was my assignment. Bye. My professor of aerospace studies called me in and said, they’re expanding the test program for women pilots. They’re now going to start taking women right out of college because the previous classes were off of active duty.

Would you like me to send your name in? And I said yes, sir. Please send my name in. And there were eight of us that were selected from across the country to go in 1978. And then my group of four went to Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, the first class there at Vance. And so that’s a little kind of a synopsis of how I got interested in flying.

There’s so much more that I could say. But when I talk to young people, I encourage them to read books, and not just because I wrote a book, but even before I wrote my book, they were books were such a good factor in my life. And I tell the kids they’re all on the phones today. They’re all on social media.

We’re not going to stop that, but I’ll tell them the phones aren’t bad for you, but too much time on the phone is bad for you. Too much of anything isn’t good for any of us, of course. So I try to encourage them to put the phone away, pick up a good book, and go sit down and live that adventure in the book.

And. I think you’ll find it lowers anxiety also because these young people, they’re all saying we have anxiety and I’m kind of wondering why I don’t remember so many of my generation having anxiety and what’s different. I think it’s all the social media and all the expectations to post and be out there and look good.

And I don’t think that’s healthy. Too much of that is not healthy. So get a good book. Read history read science fiction, read whatever you’re interested in. That’s a way to explore. That’s a way to have an adventure. And along the way, you’ll find something that you want to do with your life. So, I think that’s my long answer to your question.

I still read a lot. When I was in college, high school and college, I read a lot of science fiction. Now I’m into history, and I tell people that when I was young, I read about the future. Now that I’m old, I read about the past, but that’s the way it is.

[00:16:28] Liz: That’s great. I think that there, yeah we, it would be unfortunate to ignore the opportunities that are on social media in which to hook our young people.

And so that’s part of kind of what I hope to do is like there are many layers, many levels on which to engage with somebody’s story. And so just, A quick post with a picture of you in your suit and like just a quick summary of the things that you accomplished is one way to pique somebody’s interest and then hopefully pull them in to come and listen to an interview with you and hear your story and then, Oh, I want to read.

I want to fully engage in this story and learn the lessons that she learned along the way. So that’s my hope of how we can use social media to pull young people into these stories and get their interest. And engage them.

[00:17:21] Eileen: One of the things that I’m glad you mentioned that because that as a child, although I didn’t have social media movies and television programs of what my generation had, and they were very inspirational too.

And today I think it’s more of the podcast, online events and interviews and things like that, that are maybe a little more intelligent than some of the crazy stuff I watched on TV when I was a kid.

[00:17:48] Liz: Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s a very good point. Yeah, like my 11 year old is on YouTube all the time and he’s actually learning things.

We’re not, instead of watching the silly like sitcoms that we were watching when we were kids. So. One of the moments that I thought was pivotal that you shared about your childhood and having been sort of an underachiever myself as a student in school was the moment of your high school graduation when you saw everybody around you getting accolades, and scholarships, and you were like, You know what? I could have done all that if I had just tried. And then you vowed to always try from then on, and that is so inspiring because you kept to your word, obviously, and kept going. But just talk about that epiphany a little bit.

[00:18:43] Eileen: Yeah high school graduation was a huge turning point in my life.

And what I remember was not the graduation ceremony itself, that was in a baseball field and the parents attended, but what I remembered was… It was in the morning and it was the awards ceremony and I was watching students get scholarships different awards, going to these tremendous colleges, and I hadn’t even tried in high school.

And I think part of it was part of it, I was very shy. When I was in second grade, I remember my mother sent me to speech lessons. Because I stuttered and I think the stuttering was, had more to do with the fear that I had of being around people. And I’m not sure why I was like that. I had issues in my book.

I talk about issues with my family. My dad was a big drinker. There were issues with and that my mom and dad eventually separated. It’s hard to say if that was, played a role in my shyness. Or if that was just inherent in the nature of who I am, but I’ve always was very shy and I was afraid to speak up.

And when I did, I stuttered now, not at home. I only started in school or around people. I didn’t know. So I remember going to the speech classes. And this shyness went with me all through high school, and upon high school graduation, I had, I asked myself, what do you want to do? My dad always said, stop following the crowd.

If all your friends jumped off the Walnut Street Bridge, would you jump off the Walnut Street Bridge? He would yell at me and say, stop following the crowd. Have a mind of your own. And his voice still echoes in my head today. And it finally hit me, what does Eileen want to do? And I realized I like math, I like problem solving, I really like the military the life of discipline, and the life of expectation that you have in the military.

And I learned that from reading books. My dad was in the Navy in World War II, but I had never lived with anyone who was active duty military. That life style appealed to me. So that’s when I started looking at the Air Force, R-O-T-C-I subscribed to Air Force Magazine and I was reading books about pilots from Vietnam War, the Korea War, world War I, world War ii.

What they, what kind of things they did. And so I decided I wanted to be an Air Force pilot at the same time that the Air Force opened flying. So, but your question was on high school graduation, and it was a moment in my life in my head that I decided to make a change and ask myself where are my talents?

Where can I make contributions? What job should I have? And what’s right for me? And that’s because my parents encouraged me. And my mom used to tell me Everybody in the world is different. Think about that. Every person looks different and has different genes. And we all need to take a look at our talents and the contributions that we can make to the world.

If we all did the same thing, the world would be a boring place and we’d never get anywhere as a society. And those are the things that she taught me. And so I think all those things, and they said those things to me when I was very young. But of course I pushed back. I didn’t really understand what they were talking about until…

I was out on my own out of high school, so I like that question that you asked and for young people out there in high school. I encourage them. I mentioned earlier to read books, but I encourage them to look at their own talents. Don’t blow off high school really try your best, especially in your senior year when maybe you only need.

Two courses to graduate. Don’t just take two courses and graduate, but it’s for most people, it’s free. Take as many courses as you can. Take courses in technology or maybe take some sports or join a club. And if you’re a little bit shy, you got to realize that other people have their own issues too.

And other people are. shy and other people want to be loved and want to have friends. And in that way you can reach out to other people through the activities that you enjoy. So those things I learned later in life and I wish I had listened to my parents sooner, but I was a little bit strong minded.

But I definitely outgrew my shyness and I think the Air Force helped me. In that greatly.

[00:23:59] Liz: Yeah. So you one of the things I admired also is that you had responsibilities at home and you didn’t necessarily, you hadn’t worked really hard to get these scholarships. So you had to support yourself and you did that through starting out in community college.

And then you went on to a university for, and ROTC, which is a wonderful program to join the military. I didn’t, I took a completely different path, but I enlisted first and then went through officer candidate school after five years of enlisted, but I thought that was a really . . . your story, for me, despite the fact that you didn’t kill it in high school, you were able to pull it together and really find your direction, which is, I think, some kids maybe get to the end of high school and feel the same way you do. And maybe you’re like I blew it.

But, it’s not over yet. You still have opportunities ahead of you, and as evidenced by your success. So you went to flight school and you said you were one of the first women to go to, it was Vance. Is that where you were?

[00:25:02] Eileen: Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma.

It’s still open today. Still training pilots.

[00:25:08] Liz: And your flight school experience is probably like many other military flight school experiences. Was there anything that stands out that you wanted to talk about from that?

[00:25:20] Eileen: Pilot training was difficult on looking back. I have all my, all these great memories and there’s so much I could talk about that. I think the 1st thing is the fact that we were, there were 4 women in the 1st class, as I mentioned earlier to ever go through pilot training at Vance. And not only did we have to succeed for ourselves so we could get our wings in the Air Force, but we also had to succeed because how we did was going to determine whether the Air Force would continue to train women.

And so far, there were definitely two, maybe three classes that went through before me at other bases. And they were doing pretty much the same as the guys. And so that was good. So that took a little bit of pressure off of us, but of the four of us, only three of us graduated. So not every we weren’t pushed through the program or we weren’t told you’re all going to graduate.

We had to compete equally with the guys. And in some ways it might have been a little more difficult because we knew that people were watching us. How did the women do? What were their grades? If we made a mistake, oh, the woman made a mistake. Or if we got a special deal, oh, you got that deal just because you were a woman.

And some of that was happening. I talk in my book about the fact that my… Wing Commander decided he wanted me to be the first woman to fly in an F 15. So he got me a good deal flight in an F 15 ahead of many of the guys that were senior to me. It was a one time flight as part of a buddy program.

It turned out I wasn’t the first woman to fly in an F 15, but he thought I was. So that created a little bit of animosity. And by the way, that flight happened after I graduated it, I had made it through the program and came back as an instructor. I stayed at Vance after graduation, pilot training was a one year program.

Vance brought me back as an instructor in the T 38. And for the three years as an instructor, I was the only woman in the squadron instructor. They brought on up to three women instructors in the other squadron, the T37 squadron. And it wasn’t until after I left that they brought in another woman.

So the interesting thing about that is everybody knew what I was doing. My voice on the radio was different. In the T 38, oh, you hear a woman’s voice, it must be Eileen. That was in I would say depending on like the times that we were flying, because of the four women, we were kind of spread out throughout the day.

And then later as an instructor it was mostly my students on the radio. But if I came on the radio, oh, yep, that’s Eileen and her student. So there was a little bit more of a spotlight. And I learned to live with that. There was something I was not going to change. And I had to I want to say convince myself that it’s not about me, it’s about doing the right thing, being the best pilot I can be, getting along with the other pilots, being the best instructor I can be, helping the guys, working with the guys, not being confrontational.

If I heard little remarks and those would happen earlier when I was a student, maybe somebody would make a remark about something that didn’t matter. But it was rude. I would either ignore it, or I would say something like, maybe you shouldn’t say that, but I would not get into arguments with people because I knew that would be a losing battle early on and I really tried to help the guys and if I saw somebody in my class might have been struggling a little bit maybe reaching out to him and letting him talk to me. Not really preaching, but listening that maybe that’s why they brought me back as an instructor.

But I think that really being helpful to people and letting them know that I was there because I wanted to be the best pilot I could be and I wanted to be an Air Force pilot and I wasn’t there to promote myself or hey, look at me. I’m the 1st woman instructor. No, I really didn’t want to hang that out there and look like I had a chip on my shoulder, because I knew that wasn’t going to work. So I tried the collaborative, way of, I want to say working with people and I think in the end that worked and a lot of women don’t want to come off as looking weak. And I totally understand that.

We don’t want to I, when I talk about being humble, and you mentioned earlier about humility, I think it’s very important in my leadership style to be humble. And that doesn’t mean. Being weak or maybe indecisive, but being humble in the sense that I am willing to listen and not feel like somebody is threatening my status or threatening my authority as an instructor, but really listening to the feedback from my students and helping them learn as much as they can.

And it’s hard to listen. It really is. You have to be an active listener. You have to start asking questions on top of. Listening to comments passively, you have to start asking questions to listen actively. And that was the kind of instructor, the kind of pilot, the kind of person I wanted to be.

I wasn’t great at it. I know that I am not the best listener, so I would work very hard at really trying to understand what the message was coming my way. From my students, or even from my bosses or my peers. So anyway, long answer, I’m probably getting a little bit off the subject, but I think these are things that are important to me.

And throughout my career, I was in leadership positions, whether I wanted it or not. That’s the way the military is. If you’re the senior ranking officer, you’re. For example, I was the senior ranking officer in my test pilot school class, and these people are very my classmates, very self motivated.

They didn’t need somebody to tell them what to do. They needed somebody to be there to listen when problems arose. And then to help them solve the problems by, talking to the right people or coming up with the right ideas. And so I think that being humble is you can be be a, have a confident humility.

I call it confident humility, where as the leader, you are confident in yourself enough that you’re willing to let your guard down and really listen to other people’s ideas. Maybe my idea isn’t always the right answer. Thank you. Maybe somebody else has a better idea and be willing to listen to that. So hopefully that’s the answer to your question.

[00:32:49] Liz: I think you’re like, you’re very delicately dancing around the idea that a lot of us dealt with a lot of sexism and then also just the competitive nature of aviation and military aviation is that people say things sometimes, there’s some hostility, and one of the things that I admired about your story is you being able to navigate through that and come out generally unscathed it appeared. I don’t feel like in the book that you pretended it didn’t happen, but you just like, you just described like how your survival skills for navigating that, that environment were different than some other people’s, because it’s not like we were handed a toolkit on how to deal with it.

[00:33:41] Eileen: Yeah I look at the things that are happening today because I in the military and maybe in aviation and other career fields and women are still having issues in the work environment with maybe rude comments or sexual harassment. I cannot believe this is still happening.

I think it’s so unacceptable. But when I look back to when I came in the Air Force in 1978, it didn’t happen as much back then. And I think part of it was. The women were new and people were like dancing around us they were afraid to I’m going to get in trouble if I say something, really didn’t know what to do with us back in the early days.

So, I think maybe I had it a little bit easier. I’m not going to say there’s anything about me that’s any different. I did have rude comments. And when I was very young, I would just ignore them and keep going on and never push back in the military, I’m somebody higher rank is making a rude comment to me.

I’m supposed to respect his rank. But yet he’s doing something inappropriate. At first I would ignore those. After I started being around a while and started getting smarter, I would say, maybe you shouldn’t say that, because, like, instead of I could there’s all kinds of techniques that you can use, but that’s a pushback. It’s done politely. It’s done without, I want to say, increasing the heat, which, in a potential argument that could develop, because they know that they shouldn’t be doing that and people can get, it’s just unacceptable behavior, sexual harassment, totally unacceptable, but some people just don’t seem to get the message.

So you just remind them. And the other thing I found, this is separate from rude people, but just the vast majority of guys that I worked with were very, I would say, good team players. We’d help each other. We’d work together. The vast majority of the guys were just great. And I loved working with the guys.

And I laugh at their jokes, and we try to solve problems together, and I think that it was just over time a mutual respect develops. And I remember some guys would come up to me in the hallway and say, Gee, I’m really sorry you have to deal with that person. Can I help you? Is there anything I can do?

And so some of the guys were really supportive. And I would say the vast majority of them were really good to work with. I don’t know what’s happening today. It seems to be that we still have problems with harassment. And maybe that’s more of, I’m certainly not blaming the women, I think that has something to do with the culture of the country overall.

That maybe we’re not teaching our kids to respect other people when they’re young, the way we used to when I was young. Like when I was young, I never talked back to an adult. I’d get sent to my room, I would get in massive trouble, my brothers too. But I think that maybe the culture, and that’s probably way off the subject, but I’m following this with a lot of interest and I if I could give any advice to women out there, just be as professional as you can and don’t let other people break you down.

Just keep doing your job. The best that you can. And honestly, the guys really respect you for being a great pilot. Whatever job you have, maybe you’re not a pilot, you’re doing something else. You’re really good at what you’re doing and yeah, we do have to work harder. But I think in the long run, it’s better for us because we’re better at our jobs, we’re more confident in our jobs, and we’re more confident in ourselves.

No, I don’t engage with people that are rude. I don’t engage with them at all.

[00:37:51] Liz: Good for you. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, but I think that’s great advice for the women and advice for the men, is be professional also. And I mean my, I’m following it also because I care about the environment that the future of women coming into aviation and like the experience that they’re going to have. We want to leave it a better place than we found it. So that’s my hope for them.

So you finished your tour as a flight instructor, which is amazing. And then, one of the things that surprised me, because I didn’t know before is that you weren’t a fighter pilot, that you were flying the C 141 and I love your stories about flying all over the world in that aircraft, but there’s one story in particular that caught my interest.

My last tour on active duty was as the Senior Defense Official to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean. So I was the senior military advisor to the U. S. Ambassador to Barbados and six other island nations, one of which was Grenada. And I was just completely shocked and surprised at your story of having participated in Grenada.

Tell us just a little bit about that experience.

[00:39:27] Eileen: . I was actually very excited and very honored to be part of that operation. Even before I knew what was going on, we were deployed to Pope Air Force Base. Actually, we had come off a trip. If you might remember, the Marine barracks was bombed in Beirut, and we lost over 200 Marines. Other countries lost their soldiers also. That was a terrible tragedy.

I was called off of alert to go to Cherry Point, North Carolina, and bring Marines and much of their equipment over to Beirut. We, as far as Germany, we ran out of crew duty day, so I never made it into Beirut. The crew that took our plane and our cargo and our Marines in actually did a blackout landing on the runway there, came back to Germany.

We picked our airplane up, headed back to Dover. When we checked in at the command post in Dover, they said to us, you’re going to Grenada. We said, Oh where’s Grenada? Why are we going there? It wasn’t on our manifest. We’ve invaded Grenada, is what the command post told us. We’ve, the first wave, had already headed down there.

So my crew, we took a quick crew rest and we flew down to pick up the 82nd Airborne at Pope Air Force Base and fly them into Grenada. Now, I went in there the day after the invasion. And the field was mostly secure, but it was already a combat zone. And it was interesting that back in those days, women were not allowed to fly combat aircraft and we were not allowed to go into combat zones.

But when the shooting started and that mission in Grenada started, the command post didn’t have time to figure out where the women were and to pull the women off the crews. They just said, we need a crew, you’re out in the system, go. And so my crew went down there and I actually got combat pay.

This was like 1983 and the law for women in combat was not changed until 1993.10 years later, 10 years after Grenada, the law was changed, but there were many women that went into Grenada, not just pilots, but in the other services, and I think the military looked at that and said the women performed, they did their job.

I could go on and tell you the story about what I did, which was not really that amazing. The crews, I will tell you one thing is we were riding out at Pope on the bus to get in our airplane and fly down there. A crew that had just been there was on the bus. In fact, the aircraft commander was a classmate of mine from pilot training, Jeff Brake, and he was telling us, “We were getting shot at.”

Now, they were doing airdrop. Their crew was out of Charleston and they had taken, I think they had also taken some of the 82nd Airborne down there, and they were flying over Grenada, and the guys were jumping out of the plane to secure the airfield. When I went down there, we landed with our crew, but we were expecting more of a, more shooting, but apparently it had the field was secure, by the time we got there,.

But I felt like we made we really made a difference not only taking the 82nd Airborne down. These guys were jumping up and down. There were over 200 on the plane and the whole plane was shaking. And before we took off out of Pope, our loadmaster called us and said we’re short of oxygen masks and the command post said, go without the oxygen mask.

Just go. We don’t have time and we pretty much threw out the rule book. Boom, throw it out the window. Just get down there. You get these guys down there and we landed, there was a temporary command post down there that had, I want to say they were frankly, hostages for a short period of time that had been held by the Cuban soldiers.

And these were 36 medical students and the command post said, hang on, we’re going to send some students out to have you bring, take them back to Charleston, South Carolina. And we flew these students back. Some of them had families with them. We landed at Charleston and they got off the plane.

They were kissing the ground and they were saying, Thank you, President Reagan, for coming down and rescuing us. They were very scared medical students that had been held hostage by the Cuban soldiers. And I listened to their stories and actually there were a couple children that came back with them. And I felt a lot of reward doing that mission.

Nobody cared who the pilots were. We were sitting looking out the window watching, after we landed at Charleston, watching our medical students get off the plane. I remember the local press was there, all the lights were out the media, the base commander, the mayor of Charleston microphones.

And it was really a big deal. And not just for us having that experience, but I think for the United States basically in the 1980s were peacetime, pretty much the whole 1980s were peacetime, except for a few skirmishes and Grenada was one of them. And I, I really feel fortunate to be part of that not just because of the personal experience, but it was a show of strength for the United States and people didn’t mess with us while Ronald Reagan was president and the medical students were praising him for sending the military down to get them out of that bad situation and bring them back bring them back home.

[00:44:58] Liz: Have you been back to Grenada since?

[00:45:01] Eileen: I have not been to Grenada. But that is one of my goals is to get back there. And I’ve never been to Barbados. I’d love to go there also. The Caribbean islands are beautiful.

I’ve been to many of them, but I need to get back to those too.

[00:45:15] Liz: Let’s talk more about that in a bit because St. George’s University, the medical school there has, we diplomatically, we call it the ‘intervention’ of Grenada rather than an ‘invasion.’ The island is still very interesting. It’s still very split in how they celebrate that occasion.

And so half of the island is not enamored with what the U. S. did there and the other half is. And the university is one of those places where every year the U. S. Ambassador goes and there is an observance and a ceremony and a celebration of the U. S. intervention there. And they would lose their minds if you were to come down there and speak. So we’ll talk about that later. See if we can send you down there. That would be neat.

Okay, so just we got to get to flying in space because that’s why we’re here even though you did all these amazing things up until then to include, so one of the, just to go really quickly over like the interim of you getting picked up for teaching a position at the academy and going to graduate school at Stanford and not feeling like you wanted to spend a year and a half at Stanford because of your professional timeline.

And so you’re like, ah, I don’t want to, I don’t want to spend that much time in Palo Alto and you rush through this master’s degree program, which is just incredibly impressive. And then you teach calculus and all these things at the Academy. And what I was frustrated on your behalf for, and I was an aviation assignment officer in my service, so I was the one delivering the bad news about policies and things like this, where twice, twice, you were delayed in trying to apply for test pilot school.

And I was so frustrated on your behalf, but you finally got there. Can you just give us a quick rundown of like your feelings through that experience.

[00:47:19] Eileen: Yeah. I think there’s so many lessons to be learned. I was very impatient when I was young, and you mentioned the deal at Stanford. It is hard to go back to graduate school.

I had already served seven years in the Air Force, flying T 38s. I was an instructor. I flew the C 141. I had been flying around the world. I was an aircraft commander. I had very challenged instructor pilot job, had very challenging positions. And now I’m back in the classroom. That was a hard transition for me to make.

I wasn’t happy. Although I think if I was younger I would have been happy. I enjoyed my undergraduate years in college, but I said I need, I’ve got to get the degree. I’ve got to get out of here and get back into the real world. And nothing bad on Stanford. Stanford is a great university and beautiful climate and all that, but I took an extra course.

Stanford’s on the quarter system. So I took extra courses and I, what was a year and a half program I finished in 1 year and I was able to start at the Air Force Academy. And in the back of my mind, I had. The fact that I wanted to go to test pilot school and then follow on with the astronaut assignment and I didn’t want to waste time.

I could see because once you hit 10 years time in service, you’re not eligible for the test pilot school anymore. They have a cutoff there. And I applied the 1st year. They didn’t look at my application because I didn’t have 2 years time on station at the Air Force Academy. Okay, that’s the Air Force’s rule.

I didn’t know it. I found out afterwards. I never met the board. I sent in the paperwork, but they kept my application off in the filing cabinet, I would say. And when the list came out of who was selected for Air Force Test Pilot School, I wasn’t on it. And I thought maybe I didn’t make the cut, but no, I was never considered.

That happened the following year also. I sent the application in, but they told me, Oh, you’re on a three year directed duty assignment, and we’re not waiving that. So I had to apply a third time to the Test Pilot School. But now I needed a waiver for the 10 years time in service. And the Air Force gave that to me, and they said you’ve been trying for this for so long, we’ll give you the waiver which is why I like to tell young people, as soon as you become eligible for whatever position it is that you’re looking for, start applying, don’t wait, because it helps to show that you’ve you have that motivation and that strong desire to do this, job or position or whatever it is that you’re applying for.

So they gave me the waiver, and I made it I was selected for the Air Force Test Pilot School in my third attempt. Because I was over 10 years time in service, when I started my class, I was the senior ranking officer. I was a major. And because of that, they made me the class leader, which was not something I wanted to do, because Test Pilot School was hard enough in and of itself.

There’s, you’re not only flying, like, 30 different types of aircraft, But you’re writing reports. You have to give presentations. There’s a big actually a couple of projects that you need to do and it’s every, you can’t waste a minute, but I was also the class leader. So that was just an extra responsibility I had, but I managed it and we had a great class, a class still.

Keeps in touch. We still have reunions. So I’m very glad that I had that experience. But while I was a student at the test pilot school, see, I had been applying to the astronaut program also. So, while I was a student there, NASA called me for an interview. It’s not all that easy to get into the astronaut program, but I did get in on my 1st.

Application, which very much surprised me that I was selected the 1st time around because I was sure that it would take 2 or 3 attempts, but I was lucky that my graduation date from the test file school was only 1 month before the start date. But two months before the start date for the astronaut program.

So, they selected me to come in as a pilot to the astronaut program in 1990. So, I would say that’s the first time I didn’t really have to fight the system for years and years to… I didn’t talk about some of the earlier issues I had when women weren’t allowed to fly combat aircraft because I was fighting that early in my career.

Women could fly non combat, but they couldn’t fly combat. That was a whole separate battle that I tried to fight unsuccessfully, but I tried to fight that with courtesy and with humility, not being rude to people. But that failed. And then finally in 1993, they lifted the combat restriction, but I was already at NASA as an astronaut at that point.

So I talk about that in the book throughout the chapter on test pilot school. Astronaut selection.

[00:52:17] Liz: Yeah. I loved reading about the comaraderie that you and all of those smart people had at test pilot school. It sounded like it was a really fun, you made the most of it even though it was such a challenging experience.

[00:52:31] Eileen: Actually, lemme say that, that year at test pilot school is highly stressful. So the two classes end up playing practical jokes on each other and part of it is just kind of. Letting off steam, but after I wrote the chapter on test pilot school, I went back and read it and said I need to tone down these practical jokes because people are going to think that all they do at the test pilot school is play jokes on each other.

So I took out several of the practical jokes and I added more of what is in the curriculum.

[00:53:00] Liz: Oh, come on. I love those stories.

[00:53:04] Eileen: Yeah. I don’t remember which ones I put out, but there were plenty of them, but we, but there was good camaraderie between the classes. Yeah. And you do it, it is a very stressful year. So it’s okay to blow up steam. And we had our class had a patch and we had a a saying.

No permanent damage. So that goes back to a story of we were playing jokes on each other and our school commandant said, the jokes are okay, but I don’t want to see any permanent damage from these jokes. So we put that on our class patch.

[00:53:42] Liz: That’s great. No, it sounds like everyone had a good sense of humor about it once everybody sort of got themselves under control.

Those are great stories. I have a question for you now, like this is kind of jumping ahead in your career, but so test pilot had been a requirement to be an astronaut forever. And then I don’t know whether test pilot was a requirement to be a pilot at the time that you were selected. But from your perspective, having flown four missions as a pilot in the shuttle, do you think that was critical for your preparation to be able to do that?

[00:54:17] Eileen: Yes, definitely. And if you look at the written requirements being a test pilot is not mandatory. To be a shuttle pilot, it was quote, highly desired and looking back, I can’t think of a shuttle pilot who was not a military test pilot. I think the language that you speak as a test pilot and the types, the way you fly missions, and the types of models that we used and the type of problem solving techniques and project management, I could go on and on, were similar from military test flying to the shuttle.

We have learned that the shuttle was really in a flight test environment throughout the 30 years that it flew, because there’s so much that we don’t know first of all about the shuttle, but we learned as the years went by, but towards the end of the program, we were still learning how the shuttle interacted with the environment of space and the stresses of launch, the stresses of returning to flight, returning to the earth you have to have a heat shield.

And then of course the shuttles being out near the beach where they’re exposed to salt water, there were many things with the aging of the shuttle that we were learning and we were still running tests on it on landing and roll out and, up in orbit, we were still running tests on the shuttle.

So it really was in a, I want to say, flight test environment throughout the 30 years that it flew. We never declared the shuttle operational, but we started flying it with an operational attitude. And that was one of the causes of the Columbia accident, that we were pressing too hard. And we didn’t really understand how the shuttle was aging and interacting with the environment without going into a lot of detail. I do that in my book, the causes of the Columbia accident and how we came out of that and how we decided to retire the shuttle and move on to something else. But I think the fact that I had been through the Air Force Test Pilot School made a big difference in my ability to do the job as a shuttle pilot and commander.

And also my credibility in understanding the engineers and the flight controllers and understanding the type of stresses that an aerospace vehicle goes through. I had only done one project as a test pilot before I came to NASA, so I didn’t have a lot of experience as a test pilot.

But the astronaut selection board told me the important things that you’ve had the school and you’ve had some experience and I found that they were right because I felt very prepared coming from Edwards Air Force Base into the astronaut program. I felt very prepared and I never felt behind.

I always felt confident and totally prepared to take on the challenges of the job.

[00:57:41] Liz: That’s excellent. Yeah. When one of the things that struck me is when you talked about the, what you felt when you got the call that you were selected for the program and it wasn’t like excitement or like wanting to go party and celebrate.

It was just a relief. Like you had worked so hard to get there and then you got there and that was incredible. And so transitioning to talking about that experience at NASA, I just wanted to mention I, I read your book first. And then more recently have listened to a new book, The Six by Lauren Grush, which is about the first six women astronauts, which is wonderful.

What a wonderful addition to our canon of stories. It really kind of fills out a lot of the questions about our the continuum of women in aviation and space history. And so we’re going to be discussing that book in March for Women’s History Month. I’m excited about that. But what you both, if I were to go back and recommend for people, I would say, read The Six first and then read yours to kind of see, like how that, how the program evolved and how your experiences evolved. But one of the things you both talk about is just this angst, like you’ve made it to NASA and you’re all going to go through your training program. But then it’s not like you go through flight school and you just are definitely going to get to fly.

Like you have to wait your turn. And your turn is not like a number at the deli either. It’s not sequential. That must have just been maddening to wait for your assignment. You kind of expressed that in the book, but talk about that.

[00:59:28] Eileen: It was agony waiting for my first assignment and there were 23 in my class.

And I do want to say my class got along great with each other. And I credit our boss, whose name is Dan Brandenstein. He was the chief of the office when I came in as a new astronaut. And of course, we’re called ‘Asscans’ astronaut candidates. He called us in for a meeting. The 1st week we were there and he’s he said this to us.

“This program is not fair. One of you is going to fly first and one of you is going to fly last. I cannot fly all 23 of you at the same time. Get it through your head. The program is not fair.” And then he said, “When the first one of you flies, I want the rest of you to support that person. And when the last one of you flies, I want the rest of you to support that person.”

And he laid out the law and I’ll tell you it worked because our class was, we worked great together. We supported each other. We knew that just we kept reminding ourselves, we’re happy that we’re here, but it is agony waiting. And when you see, like, I wasn’t the last 1 in my class to fly, but I was 2nd to last.

And it’s, it was hard watching my classmates go and like, when am I going to go? Yeah. Another great leadership technique that the person that had taken over after Dan Brandestein was a pilot named Hoot Gibson. So now he’s in charge of the office and who does the flight assignments. And one day he called me in and said, there’s going to be several flight assignments tomorrow and you’re not on them.

I just want you to know, I haven’t forgotten about you. And that’s. That’s all a boss needs to do. And I went to the crew announcement the next day. I was very happy for my classmates and I knew that my chance was going to come. So these are things we all have to face in our lives every day. It’s like, you feel like you’re left out and maybe you feel like everybody else is getting noticed and I’ve been working hard and nobody’s noticing me. Eventually it’ll get there and it’s still hard. I know the astronauts today have to wait much longer than I did. I waited about four and a half years for my first flight. But it’s the same thing today.

Some get to fly sooner, some get to fly later. But because the missions are so much longer. They don’t get assigned as often as we did. So I like to remind the astronauts and I give a talk to every new class of astronauts that comes in and I just talk about lessons that I learned through my years as an astronaut.

Your time will come and just while you’re here, just be happy that you’re here and you get to support the exploration of space from a very unique position. And someday you’ll be able to experience that yourself. And with that comes great responsibility. You now will be asked to go out and share that experience with other people.

And you have to be careful what you say, because people are going to, many people will take, in the space program, will take what you say is gospel and be very careful that what you ask people to do is something that’s been cleared through the astronaut office and things like that.

But after my first flight I wanted to go back up again right away. And I ended up flying four times. I would have stayed and flown five or six times, but that’s another question. But the four flights that I had were incredibly amazing. Wonderful human experience. Not just the launch, but being in orbit, looking back at the Earth, and coming back to Earth and going through the post flight period of readjusting to Earth’s gravity, and then trying to express what you learned, trying to make the future missions safer.

NASA, trying to share with the public why it’s important for humans to explore space. And I don’t want to say just the United States. We are a leader in space exploration as the United States, but also with the other countries that we share our missions with. It’s so important in that we be diplomatic about it and that we keep space exploration peaceful.

And I want to say civil in the sense of a civilian space versus militarizing space. Yeah. And so that’s how we speak as NASA astronauts and try to share that great experience of taking exploration off the surface of the earth and into the solar system and someday into the galaxy.

[01:04:22] Liz: So since you’ve said all that, I’m curious to know if there is one milestone in terms of space exploration that we have not achieved yet that you hope to see in your lifetime.

[01:04:37] Eileen: Oh, without a doubt: landing humans on Mars. I think it can happen in my lifetime. Right now, the United States, with our international partners, are trying to put astronauts back on the moon. So it’s been since 1972. Twelve men have walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. The United States is the only country that has put its citizens on the moon, but no one has been there since 1972, but right now there’s a race to get back to the moon.

Now, China wants to land at the moon South Pole. Same as the United States. I can’t speak for China, other than the fact that I believe we’re in a space race with them right now, and the partners that they’re working with, but for the United States we’re working with the Canadians, the Japanese and the Europeans and others.

We want to land people on, astronauts on, the South Pole. Why do we want to do that if we’ve already had 12 people walk on the moon? The reason we’re going back to the moon is to test the equipment that we will be using on missions in the future to the planet Mars.

But the moon’s only three days away. We can get there and back pretty quickly. If our equipment fails, we can get people back. We’re, the equipment that recycles our carbon dioxide, recycles our water, our power all that has got to work. So that’s going to be tested on the moon.

Mars, on the other hand, is six months to two years, depending on where the planets are. So that equipment has got to work. So we’re going, you don’t want it to fail and now you can’t get back in time because you’re six months away. So that equipment will be tested for reliability and obviously that will function correctly and be reliable on the moon.

So those, that’s the Artemis program that I’m talking about. So the Artemis program is to send astronauts back to the moon and test the equipment so we will be able to send people to Mars. So that’s the answer to my question. Some people say if God wanted us to explore space, he would have given us a stepping stone, the moon. The moon is so close, it’s a perfect, it is the perfect test bed for what we need to do to go farther into deep space.

[01:07:02] Liz: Are you involved in these programs right now?

[01:07:04] Eileen: Right now I’m not directly involved. Last year I was I rotated off of the National Space Council Advisory Group. So for three years, a little over three years, I worked with them. And we were making recommendations to the NASA, I’m sorry, Not the NASA Advisory Council, but the National Space Council.

So the National Space Council has cabinet level people. It’s chaired by the Vice President. And on that council is the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the NASA Administrator, Homeland Security, I could go on and on, but these are people at the cabinet level, that are setting policy for not just the United States, but a policy really, because space is everywhere.

It’s very international. And some of the things that came out of that was the Artemis program policies on regulatory for, there’s so much commercial development now setting up, regulations for them that allow them the freedom, to keep them safe, but allow them the freedom to develop and explore.

One of the policies was on space traffic management and space debris. One of them was establishing the Space Force, and all of this happened back when I was an advisor. And the National Space Council is still active today. I’m not an advisor anymore.

But one of the things I, I did was I chaired the Education Committee, which was trying to figure out how to outreach to really to the educational systems in our country to help develop the workforce of the future. And for people to go into the space workforce, which is very technical, they need to have education in math, science and engineering, which really starts all the way back in elementary school. We call it STEM education, S. T. E. M. science, technology, engineering and math. So that was really my I mentioned some of the larger policies that have been established, but my particular role was in education.

[01:09:23] Liz: Okay, I want to hear more about that transition from NASA to your quote unquote civilian life, but I have questions about actually flying a shuttle.

So I was shocked to read, if I read correctly, that the first time you actually were at the controls of a shuttle in the atmosphere was on your third flight when you were the commander to land it. Is that true?

[01:09:46] Eileen: Yes. That’s right. Now, space shuttle pilots and commanders train in a Gulfstream II, which is, it’s like a bizjet.

It’s like a big bizjet. But that aircraft is modified, just the left seat, to look like the space shuttle controls, displays, and the flight control system is modified to feel like the shuttle. For a pilot to fly as a pilot on an actual mission, he or she needs 500 approaches and landings in that Gulfstream 2 simulator.

By the way, the right seat is an instructor. And we fly those missions, we climb up, and we fly the dives to the runway. And that’s how we actually practice, so we know how to land the shuttle. To be a commander, you need 1,000, you needed, back in those days, 1,000 approaches and landings in the Gulfstream 2 simulator, which we call the STA, the Shuttle Training Aircraft, before you could fly the shuttle as a commander. And those you, it takes years to, I would say if you flew a lot, you could do it in three years. But for me, it took four and a half years to get my 500 approaches.

But the first time I actually flew the shuttle, it was a shuttle Columbia, was on my third mission as commander. Of course, the commanders landed, every shuttle flight was landed by the commander. We tried autopilot. It just wasn’t a very good system. So we trained for years and years to make that 1 landing in the shuttle. As we didn’t have engines to go around and make another shot at it if we messed up the 1st time.

So we had to be very good at what we were doing. The energy is controlled by the speed brake, because you have to be able to control your airspeed as you come down, control your energy as you come down and fly, your heading alignment and your final approach and your landing. So we use the speed brake to control energy, but we had just one shot at it.

It’s like flying a glider. But it’s a big heavy brick that happens to have no engines. So my first landing, I knew I was the first woman to land a space shuttle and people were going to be watching. I did not want to make a mistake. I didn’t want to land fast. I didn’t want to land slow. I didn’t want to blow a tire.

I didn’t want to land off center line. It was very important for me to put that shuttle down and show the world that women can do it. Yeah, I put a little pressure on myself, but a lot of the women pilots I knew were saying to me, come on, Eileen, do it for us, do it for women. And so that was a little bit of pressure there.

And I’m happy to say my first landing, I was shooting for, 195 was my touchdown speed, and I landed at 194, so I was only one knot off on my landing, and I was pretty close to center line, but you really want to, when you stop the shuttle, you want that nose wheel right on the center line, and I think I was close enough, and it was a night landing so that made it a little bit more difficult, and but we had trained for that, so the first landing went well.

I landed the shuttle a second time in 2005. That one I landed a little bit fast, and I’m not going to go into why that happened. It was a night landing at Edwards, and fortunately, it was a, I want to say, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. And the tires looked perfect, so I just landed that second one a little bit fast.

But the shuttle has only been landed three times by a woman. And after me, Pam Melroy flew as commander and she did a great job. Pam Melroy is now the Deputy Administrator, the number two person at NASA. And her and I were the only two women out of 130 some flights of the shuttle, we were the only two women to land a space shuttle.

It’s going to be different going forward in the future because there’s many more women astronauts now. But back in our day, as we talked about earlier, women couldn’t be pilots in the Air Force, and then they finally changed that policy and then they changed the law in 1993, allowing women in combat. Combat aircraft. So more and more women are eligible for the astronaut program now.

[01:14:16] Liz: If they say that you’re only as good as your last landing, even if it was a little fast, you’ve landed the space shuttle. So that’s pretty good. It’s pretty good. We’re pretty proud of you.

[01:14:26] Eileen: I’m still made at myself for that last landing.

[01:14:30] Liz: No. We’re proud of you. Don’t worry about it. Let it go. Let that one go.

And, talking about the weight of all these, all of these women’s hopes and dreams from all over the world. But I think the most important group out of that, of, out of all of us were those the ladies who were left from what do they call themselves? People refer to them as the Mercury 13, but they, they call themselves the F.L.A.T.s, right? And the fact that they were there to celebrate your first launch was amazing.

[01:15:01] Eileen: Right. So I met many of them back in, I believe it was 1994. At Oklahoma City, they were doing a reunion and many of them had not met each other, but there was a filmmaker that was wanting to do a film on them, so he brought them all to Oklahoma City, which is the headquarters of the 99s, women pilots, and they invited me to that reunion weekend, and I got to know, of course, not all 13 of them were still alive, but the ones that came, I got to know them and I said, you know what, I’ll invite you all to my launch and they came to my first launch in February of 1995 and the press down there at Kennedy Space Center just loved them.

And it was this story just grew and now there’s many books and a lot of history has been written on them. Today, only two of them are still alive. Because when they went through their testing, Gene Nora Jessen and Wally Funk are still with us. And when they, see when they went through their testing in 1960 time frame, Wally Funk was the youngest. She was 21, but many of them were older and some were in their 30s.

Yeah. And they were brought to that clinic by Dr. Lovelace because he wanted to know how the women were going to do in the stress, stresses of the space environment. Right. And they did very well. In fact, the 13 of them that passed all of the testing went on for another round of testing.

And eventually that program was shut down for many reasons. And it’s sad that it was that was more of a, I would say a function of the times and the culture of the country. I don’t really think it had anything to do with the women’s ability to fly in space because certainly they had the ability to do that.

But NASA wanted to just fly test pilots, which back then was men. Yeah. So I feel fortunate that those I say, I, reap the benefits of the work that they did. My generation reaped the benefits of what they did, as well as what the Women Air Force Service pilots did back in World War II, because they proved that women can do it.

NASA was ready in 1976. And then for me in 1978 to bring women into the shuttle program without worrying, how are they going to do? Some people still worried. How are the women going to do when they selected the women astronauts in 1978, but I really don’t think that anyone was like, seriously worried that women were going to have a problem up there.

There was more of a curiosity about it now.

[01:17:49] Liz: Yeah. It was more, it was more the press and the public who were curious and asking wacky questions about what it was going to be like for women up there. Yeah. It seemed like professionally, especially at the time that you were accepted into NASA that you were treated like a professional, like, like the person who had accomplished the things that you had accomplished and earned the right to be there.

It didn’t seem like you experienced any questions within NASA itself about your competence at all.

[01:18:16] Eileen: No. And I would say by the time I came to NASA in 1990, it wasn’t about how am I being treated? And for me, it was always about how am I treating other people? To me, that was leadership. And I knew that I was eligible to be a shuttle commander someday.

So I just focused on, am I treating other people the way I, my father would bang that into my head. Treat other people the way you want to be treated and I still remember that is an adult and I didn’t worry too much about how I was treated. Although it does get to be a problem if you aren’t, if there clearly is blatant unfairness and that needs to be addressed when that kind of thing happens, but,I think for the most part, I focused on how am I treating other people in trying to prepare for future leadership positions.

[01:19:14] Liz: Of all of your accomplishments, what is the one that you are most proud?

[01:19:19] Eileen: Being a mother.

[01:19:21] Liz: Oh that was going to be the next topic. So now we can just combine that. That’s wonderful.

[01:19:26] Eileen: Yeah. I’d like to say I had the two best jobs in the world. I was a mother and an astronaut.

[01:19:29] Liz: At the same time.

[01:19:29] Eileen: At the same time, and I was a mother later in life, I often have young people ask me, Oh, can you be a mother and be an astronaut? And I will say, it’s not easy, but you can do it. You have to have a lot of support around you.

[01:19:47] Liz: That’s wonderful. So, so on that topic so yeah you had both of your children while you were,  so they were older, they were like five and ten when you did your last mission, which is amazing. So they hopefully have some memory of that.

I’m curious to know. So you grew up with some struggles and some challenges and those led you to be the person that you are today. And if you are like me, I had some of those as a child too, that I feel like I overcame and was able to accomplish some things in spite of, or because of them

I was the person that I was because of them and we’d obviously want to create a place where our children don’t have to struggle maybe in the same ways that we did. And I’m, I’ll just say like, I’m asking for a friend, because I’m still on the parenting continuum – I have a 31 year old a 20 year old and an 11 year old.

And so how did you instill or lead them to want to strive to be their best in an environment where they were fully supported. How did you do that? How did you accomplish that as a mother?

[01:20:53] Eileen: Yeah I tried to use my mother’s what she did with me. She was a great role model. And that’s such a tough question to answer because I could talk about that for hours.

I think one of them was when I come home from work to be present for my children. There were days that it was highly stressful, especially after the accident. And I’d come home from work and I didn’t want to bring my job stresses home around my kids, even when they were infants. Because I think an infant can really sense when an adult is upset about something or maybe might be stressed out.

So the good thing for me was the drive home. I’d leave work and as I drove home, which for me was only 15 minutes. I would mentally go through, okay, I’m not working anymore. I’m going to go spend time with my daughter and then my son was born five years later and really just be present for them.

And so I would have a little schedule, like we’re going to have dinner and then we’re going to go for a walk or maybe we’ll read books. I’ll try to have a little routine with them and then when I put them to bed, out came my laptop and I would work. I also had to make sure that I got enough sleep because it is very easy for a parent to get sleep deprived and in a leadership position, one of the worst things you can do is be a micromanager and try to do everybody’s job for them.

For me, it was more like sending people emails. Are you okay? Is everything alright? Let me know if you got any problems. Instead of trying to tell people what to do. I used to tell my daughter, she was my stress reliever. Because before I had children, I’d bring my job home and I would be thinking about it all the time.

But once I had kids, I’d come home, I had to be present for them. And I’d forget about my job for the hours that I was with them. And I would get back into, so I think, and the other thing for kids is having a routine. Having them know that they’re safe. That I’m going to make sure that as a parent, that they have rules and I enforce the rules and you’re not going to go running out in the street or you’re not going to have a cell phone when you’re in third grade.

There were some, I said, no, that’s not safe for you. So I would have certain rules for them and not everybody has to agree with my rules, but I think the fact that whatever rules you have for your kids, you have to enforce them. And then when you’re ready to change the rule, you need to tell them, okay, we’re changing the rule now. Okay. Versus letting them think that they can, life is just a free for all, because then I think the kids end up really feeling unsafe.

I think it was important for my kids, especially my daughter, who’s the oldest, to know that mom’s going into space, this is a risky thing that I’m doing, but I’m not going to go if I don’t think I’m going to come back alive, I’m going to make sure that everything is safe before I go. And it was important that I talked to my daughter about that because we had an accident, back when she was seven years old. We lost the Columbia and we lost seven crew members. And then two and a half years later. I went and I was the commander of the return to flight mission. So it was important for me to try to put their, and my son was probably a little too young to really understand, but I still talked to him about it. And my husband was there to help support.

We also had a nanny. Our first nanny didn’t work out. There was, I talk about that in the book, but she was a good nanny, but we had some problems. And we hired a second nanny and she was great. We had her for 10 years. And she was really good with the kids and gave them some stability for the times that, I didn’t really travel that much as an astronaut. But I had my, a couple of trips to Russia and I had, sometimes I would come home after dinner, but for the most part I was home every night. But it was so good for them to have that sense of stability with a nanny. Now everybody can’t afford to have a nanny. I made that a priority for my kids.

So I made sure that because of my crazy hours that they had that. And also because my husband was an airline pilot, and he was out of town for three or four days a week. Right. So we pretty much had to have this really stable child care in their life.

[01:25:32] Liz: Yeah. You are just a heroine all around. And I’m so grateful for your story that you were willing to share it. And one of the things that I’m doing here is trying to encourage other women in aviation to tell their stories. And so do you have any advice for those women who have been told many times that they should write a book? Where’s their book? What advice do you have for them?

[01:25:59] Eileen: I would say one of the first things is write things down as you go if you’re able to.

So one of the, I had a log book that was, every day that I flew, I came back and I’d write down my flight. What I did, who I flew with, of course, the number of hours, the table number of the plane and the things you have to write. But if something special happened, I was meticulous about my log book, and I really needed that.

When I went to write my book, I referenced my log books to make sure that I had dates correct. And the person I flew with, et cetera. And, like I said, having a, I want to say a historically written source was a great help for me. The other thing was staying in touch with people. I interviewed several people.

My co author interviewed several people to make sure that we didn’t miss anything, but also to make sure that the story that we were telling was fully accurate. I didn’t want to exaggerate or make things up. Everything in the book was very important, that everything in the book was accurate. It really happened.

So I think and I could go on and on with advice, but one other thing you can do is start writing chapters of your book before you even decide, seriously, I’m going to write a book. Write chapters and save them. And when you get to the point where you decide, I am going to write a book, you have something that you can start with.

The other thing is getting a publisher. We really struggled. Our first attempt at getting a publisher, we were turned down by 13, 12 or 13 companies. And most of them said . . . So we had a literary agent. Jim Hornfisher was helping us get a publisher. He couldn’t believe it, that we were turned down, but many of the companies said, oh, your story is old. You left NASA back in 2006, we would have published your book back then, but now it’s the story is old. So we got a lot of that. We got some excuses that a woman pilot had already written, a woman astronaut, excuse me, had already written a book about that. And we wanted, whatever, they were giving me all kinds, and some of them just said, I think we’re going to pass on this one, but we had written a—I’m forgetting what you call it, but my co author—proposal.

So my co author wrote the proposal while I was starting on the book writing and he did a great job on the proposal and we had all kinds of contacts and people that were willing to write blurbs for us. And but still we were turned down and then we came back and Skyhorse published the book.

I’m certain now they’re happy that they did because the book is still doing well. I’m still doing book signings. It’s been out there now for two years and I’m still working on the marketing for the book and I’m, I am just really happy that I wrote it. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I would not have written this book.

Now, nobody wants a pandemic, but if there was, for me, if there was a bright… light anywhere in the pandemic. It was that I wrote the book.

[01:29:12] Liz: We’re so glad you did. I just got a text from my husband who is traveling. He’s off in Tucson doing his thing with his job and his boss told him that he just read your book and loved it. So like, it’s not just us women in aviation. It’s not just Space geeks.

It’s just, your story is a part of our American history. It’s inspiring to everyone. We’re so grateful for you finally sharing it. And if it took a pandemic to do it, then we’re glad for that. Is there anything else you wanted to share with us?I know I’ve kept you so long. I appreciate your time so much. Do you have anything else you wanted to say or share?

[01:29:56] Eileen: There’s so much more I can say, but you know I, so I could just give a parting shot here for people that are listening. Don’t ever underestimate yourself. I think we have, I know we have dreams in our lives of things that we would love to do and we don’t always fulfill those.

I think it’s really important to keep a high energy level. I try to eat right. I try to sleep right. I’m not very good at it, but I’m always trying to discipline myself to go to the gym, to stay healthy. Healthy mind, healthy body and having the energy to go out and do the kind of things you really want to do. Maybe that’s a place you want to visit, or maybe it’s like going out and getting a pilot’s license, or something exciting like that. Maybe getting your scuba certification. Maybe writing a book. These kind of things take energy.

So I guess my parting shot would be really take care of yourself. I try to stay disciplined. Like I said, I’m not, like, very good at it, but the fact that I try, I’m better at it than I would be otherwise. Getting out of bed on time, getting to bed on time, not eating too much junk food. I travel a lot. It’s very, I want to say there’s junk food everywhere when I travel, but I really try to go for the healthy foods and keep my energy level up because I want to be around for a long time and to be able to continue to share my stories. And everybody has their own talents. And I think taking care of ourselves is so important that we can be around to take care of people and share our talents with them.

[01:31:38] Liz: That’s wonderful advice. And at 50 years old, that’s something that I’m thinking a lot about these days. So yeah, I still need to get my workout in today.

[01:31:47] Eileen: You’re so young.

[01:31:48] Liz: Haha. You know, what’s really fun after retiring from the military where everyone’s a baby, is to come into the civilian world and surround myself by all of these accomplished women and all of these women also who are like starting their aviation careers in their fifties and sixties. It’s so inspiring. So, I know I have a long road ahead of me that I would like to be active in and I want to take care of myself. And so thank you for being a role model in that regard, among all of the other wonderful things that you’ve done for us. Thank you so much for your time.

[01:32:22] Eileen: Yeah. Thanks for the conversation. It was really great.

[01:32:26] Liz: Thanks so much for listening. If you loved Colonel Collins’ story, be sure to join us in the Aviatrix Book Club in March 2024, when we’ll discuss The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Lauren Grush.

I’d like to thank Michael Wilds of Massif and Krew for his help producing this interview and for his support of all things, Literary Aviatrix.

Blue skies and happy reading.