Texas Monthly Talks

Eileen Collins

Interview by Evan Smith

July 2006

(Page 2 of 2)

Give me an example of a support job that you’ve enjoyed.
One that comes to mind is the work I did at Kennedy Space Center. For about a year and a half, I was an astronaut support person. I would strap the crews in for launch. I’d go in and get them out of the orbiter after landing. I would get their space-walk suits tested and ready to go. I did emergency training. I’d go in the orbiter to do hydraulic tests. I’d go through a test plan; even though I wasn’t actually flying the orbiter, I could run test plans. I was busy. We would also visit different work areas—you know, “What do y’all do here in the tile shop?” And we’d meet the employees and do motivational visits.

All the glory, we’ve been told for years, is in the missions. But you really seem to have enjoyed the behind-the-scenes stuff.
Yeah, it’s like, you can be the star on stage for one play, and then, for the next, you’re putting on the makeup or doing the props. You appreciate the job more when you get to see it from different angles.

Given what you’ve seen from those angles, would you feel safe on a shuttle right now?
I feel it’s safe. Okay, I need to say that it is not 100-percent-sure-thing safe. Flying in space has risks.

You mean now or always?
Always.

Even before Columbia, before Challenger, you always thought, “There’s risk”?
I’ve always known that there’s risk in space flight. I applied to the space program in 1989, after the Challenger accident [in January 1986], knowing full well that another accident could happen someday. But I see how risks here at NASA are controlled. It’s not a perfect system. We list hazards, we have controls for those hazards, and we have to meet a certain level of reliability before we can safely launch a shuttle. The longer we fly the shuttle, the more we learn about it, so the more hazards we know of. It might seem as if it’s a little more risky because we know more, but on the other hand, we have more controls now than we did in the early days. For example, on my mission, for every little thing that we thought could go wrong, somebody was out there making sure there was a control on it. And the probability of that hazard happening was very, very low.

So what happened on Columbia? Where were the controls?
What happened on Columbia was, this 1.67-pound piece of foam fell off the external tank—this is like Styrofoam—and nobody thought that that piece of foam could put a hole in the wing. Even one of the engineers who I talked to after the accident said, “There is no way I believed that a piece of foam could damage this wing leading edge. I’ve never believed it.” No one thought it could happen until five months later, when the accident board actually fired a piece of foam at the wing leading edge and put a hole in it.

Again, just to be sure, you’re comfortable enough with these sorts of unknowable things that if you were asked to go on a shuttle today, even with the troubles that have been made known to all of us in the past couple of years, you would get on—no problem.
If they came down and said, “Eileen, one of the crew members is sick on this July flight and can’t fly. We need you to step in,” I would do it.

You’d go. Does your family ever say to you, “Please don’t”?
You know, they never have. My husband has never done that. Maybe he just wants to send me away.

I can’t imagine that.
I’m just kidding. But, you know, my husband’s a pilot.

For Delta, right?
Right now he’s a pilot for Delta, but we were pilots in the Air Force together. He understands the risks of flying, and he knows that this has been my life and my passion. After the Columbia accident, I had a long talk with him about what we were going to do next. I had to ask him, “Do you want me to leave?” Which I did not want to do. And he said, “It’s very much up to you. If you want to fly, I support that.”

Wow.
I knew my flight would be the safest shuttle flight that was ever going to fly. I felt that our community here—NASA, contractors, everybody—would be extremely careful about every modification, every decision. Plus, if I’d left, what kind of message would that have sent?

All this stuff aside, what’s it like to be an astronaut? You’re one of a handful of people in the world who’ve done something that the majority of us will never get a chance to do.
As you can imagine, it’s wonderful.

I can imagine it’s scary. I can imagine a lot of things.
It’s funny: I’ve never been scared on a shuttle mission. It’s just the nature of the job. You’re busy, you’re focused, you’re well trained, and you go, “You know, if I’m going to die, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

You’ve never been scared?
No! Not scared the way I am when I’m driving. Someone pulled out in front of me on February 9—the guy just pulled right out in front of me. I was scared to death. I said, “I’m going to hit this guy, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Ka-blam. I went right into his passenger door.

Here’s another one: I will not ride roller coasters because they frighten me. Last June I went with my daughter down to Schlitterbahn at South Padre, and we got all the way up to the top of this ride, the Tempest, and I said, “I’m not going down that thing—no way!” And my ten-year-old daughter was like, “Mommy, I did it! It’s not that bad!”

And yet you’ll go into space.
Well, yes, because in space you have control, for the most part, over what you’re doing. And, you know, because you’re so well trained, you have to get into the mind-set. I know the orbiter, the systems, how it flies, what the space environment is like. I’ve been doing this for more than fifteen years. I know it. I know the people who worked on the shuttle, I know the managers, I know the flight controllers, I know the people who do the training. That is a huge boost to your confidence. It’s what I do. And, on the other hand, not only am I going up for a ride, but I’m the commander. So I not only have to be confident myself, but I have to share that confidence with my crew. Do you see what I’m saying?

Even if you are nervous, you can’t show it.
Yeah. And I’ll tell you, since you asked the question, about one time, on my second mission, when I was frightened. I was asleep on the shuttle, and I heard this great big bang. “What in the world was that?” I reported it to [ground control], and nobody knew what it was—everything was fine. Something like that will get your attention.

I suspect so!
For the most part, you know, we fly launches over and over and over again in the simulator, so when you’re out there on the launchpad, your attitude is “Let’s go. Let’s get this thing off.” You’re pretty excited—the adrenaline’s going—so when you get up in space, it’s time to get to work, to get that flight plan out, to get that robot arm out, to get the space suits out.

You’re distracted enough that you don’t think to yourself, “You know something? I’m in space.”
Well, you do think that, for two reasons. One is microgravity: Floating around is just such a wonderful experience. The second thing is looking at the earth from space. When you get into orbit and you look back and see the blue colors of the ocean and the turquoise coral reefs, when you see the really bright deserts and places that you want to travel to someday, it’s beautiful.

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