Shuttle Commander Always In Right Space at Right Time

"Oh, yeah. She was good," said Alan Davis, a former fighter pilot who taught Collins at a local airport. "I was able to chat with her about some of my experiences, but she didn't need pep talks."

Air Force 2nd Lt. Collins graduated in 1979 from pilot training at Vance Air Force Base, Okla., in the first class to accept women, and remained as an instructor on T-38 jet trainers. Then she transferred to Travis Air Force Base in California, where she met Youngs and flew C-141 cargo jets.

She went to the Air Force Academy in 1986 after negotiating a deal that allowed her first to get a master's degree in applied mathematics at Stanford University so she could qualify for an academy job. While at the academy she earned a second master's in space systems management from Webster University.

"She was already known as an outstanding pilot in the C-141 world when we got her," Litwhiler recalled. "They didn't want to let her go, but she was very persistent." And there was something else: "She wanted to go to test pilot school."

And, of course, she did.

By 1989, after two years at the academy, Collins was as hot a property as the Air Force had. "She had 1,500 hours in two different aircraft -- and an engineering background," said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Kostelnik, former head of the test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base and, as NASA's deputy associate administrator for the shuttle and space station, Collins's boss. Kostelnik had been watching her for two years because "she was exactly what we were looking for."

Collins became only the second woman to complete test-pilot school, but she was gone almost as soon as she graduated -- accepted, on her first try, to become an astronaut.

From that moment until today, she has lived in a fishbowl. There were 23 astronauts in the class of 1990, but only one was both a woman and a test pilot. From the day she arrived at Johnson Space Center, she was destined to become the first woman to pilot the space shuttle.

It happened in February 1995 with Wetherbee aboard Discovery, the same orbiter she will fly this month. Two years later she piloted Atlantis to rendezvous and docking with Mir, and in early 1998, President Bill Clinton brought her to the White House to announce that she would be the first woman to command a shuttle flight. "Her life," Clinton said, "is a story of challenges set and challenges met."

She cemented her mystique aboard Columbia as shuttle commander on July 23, 1999, when two of the main engine computers short-circuited on launch. Backups kicked in, but a second breakdown -- a leak of liquid hydrogen -- threatened to leave Columbia out of gas and not yet in orbit. An emergency landing loomed.

She never lost her cool, and Columbia had just enough fuel to creep into space. Five days later, after placing the Chandra X-Ray Observatory safely in orbit, Collins glided to a feather-light landing at Kennedy Space Center. "Eileen rocks," said pilot Jeff Ashby.

Collins was named to command the upcoming Discovery flight long before the Columbia accident and has waited for nearly 2 1/2 years while her spacecraft was outfitted with new safety features and the mission reshaped as a test flight for new equipment and procedures.

If the tedium and the endless questions -- about the shuttle's safety, about NASA's shortcomings, about the symbolism of making the first post-Columbia flight -- are wearing thin, she doesn't show it. "I am very excited to be here and very proud to be part of this great team," she said at a recent news conference.

But the other Collins is always in the background.

"I have no nerves, no emotion, no pressure," she said in an interview after the news conference, dismissing a question about all the attention her upcoming flight is getting. "I've got a $2 billion spacecraft on my hands. I don't think about what's happening outside."