The first woman to pilot and command the space shuttle.

This week on Planetary Radio.

I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Eileen Collins was the first woman to pilot the space shuttle

and the first woman to command one.

She also led NASA's return to flight mission after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia.

Her life is now the subject of a documentary called Space Woman,

and she's here with us today.

And of course, we'll close out with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist, who joins us for What's Up.

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awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. When Colonel Eileen Collins

was a kid in Elmira, New York, she dreamed of flying. She read books about pilots and astronauts,

and saved up her money from odd jobs to pay for flying lessons.

She kept her dreams quiet, though, knowing that most people would tell her that she couldn't

do it because she was a girl. In 1995, she piloted the space shuttle discovery on STS63,

becoming the first woman to pilot a U.S. spacecraft. That was the mission that made the first

space shuttle approach to the Russian Space Station Mir. She returned to space in 1997 aboard

Atlantis for a docking at the Mir space station. Then in 1999, she commanded Space Shuttle

Columbia on STS93, becoming the first woman to command a space shuttle

mission.

They deployed the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which remains one of NASA's flagship space

...