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NASA Focuses on Future on Anniversary of Shuttle Columbia Disaster

Posted on: Sunday, 1 February 2004, 06:00 CST

Feb. 1--Eileen Collins knows all about the demands of history.

The Air Force pilot became the first woman to command a NASA mission in 1999, when her crew aboard shuttle Columbia successfully delivered a $1.5 billion telescope to orbit.

Even so, the wife and mother doesn't spend her nights pondering the larger significance of her next assignment: leading the crew of the first shuttle flight after the Columbia tragedy. NASA tentatively is planning to launch shuttle Atlantis on a 13-day flight to the international space station sometime in September.

"I could make time for almost anything," Collins said recently in a phone interview from Johnson Space Center in Houston. "But I'd rather focus on what the crew can control: the critical, hands-on execution of this mission in orbit."

Before the shuttle disaster, Collins' team had been preparing for a routine flight to the station, where they were to drop off a new crew and supplies, then carry the existing station residents back to Earth.

Everything has changed since the accident.

One of Collins' original crew members left Earth already aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket for a stint on the space station. Three additional astronauts have been added to her group, and the mission plans have been totally rewritten.

Now, the seven astronauts will be doing a variety of tasks that are essential for the continued operation of the three remaining shuttles, including testing ways to inspect and repair damage to the ships. Columbia was destroyed after superheated gases seeped inside a damaged left wing during reentry into the atmosphere. Seven astronauts died in the accident.

For NASA, the underlying mission is to prove that the agency can increase safety. Collins said she is confident things are moving along and that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will rebound from the tragedy.

"If I didn't think something was safe and I wasn't satisfied, then I have ways of dealing with that," Collins said. "Frankly, what I tell my family is: If I didn't feel it was safe, I wouldn't go."

She was just a month away from her intended launch date when Columbia broke apart over Texas. The seasoned pilot watched the tragedy on television with her son, then 2 years old. She also has an 8-year-old daughter.

It was hard for anyone to fathom NASA's future on that awful day. But now, a full year later, the wounded space agency has new marching orders.

Collins, dressed in the signature blue flight suit of the astronaut corps, was sitting in the audience last month when President Bush visited NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., and announced plans for America to return to the moon.

He pledged that U.S. astronauts would go even farther someday, on to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.

Collins finds the potential for exploration exciting, but hopes the shuttle program doesn't wither in significance. She said there is a bit of nostalgia as the orbiters approach their targeted date of retirement in 2010.

"I'm thrilled about the challenges we've been presented," Collins said. "I think it's the right thing to do, but the shuttle flights and the space-station construction have to be completed successfully to get the rest of these initiatives going. I would like to see the shuttles retired after a series of safe and successful flights -- not because of some unexpected incident."

Collins, 47, grew up in the small town of Elmira, N.Y., and went to an area community college while she juggled part-time jobs to earn money for flying lessons. Collins went on to earn a degree in math and economics from Syracuse University, then joined the Air Force.

All women were barred from combat when Collins got her wings in 1979, so she became an instructor for T-38 training jets and also flew C-141 cargo aircraft. She later became the second woman admitted to the Air Force Test Pilot School in California, where she was working in 1990 when NASA accepted her into the astronaut corps.

Collins made two other flights before her 1999 debut as a mission commander. A longtime astronomy buff, Collins said the United States cannot stop its exploration of the universe. The crew on her last flight released the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which studies objects such as black holes, exploding stars and the giant clouds of hot gas that litter the universe.

"If we're going to ensure the survival of the human species, we're going to have to get off the planet and live in other areas of the solar system," Collins said. "We need the space station to do research on human existence in space, then we have to go back to the moon and on to Mars someday."

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