#79 - From Cockpit to Space: On Grit, Leadership, and Space Travel with Col. Eileen Collins

[00:00:00] Hey everybody, Ryan Gibson from Passive Income Pilots. We're excited to announce our very first in-person meetup. So come see me and Tait at Atlanta, Georgia on Veterans Day, November 11th from 5 to 8 p.m. And we're going to be meeting at the Line Creek Brewing in Peachtree City, Georgia. Come unwind, relax, meet fellow aviators that invest and fly and also meet myself and Tait. We look forward to seeing you there. If you'd like to register, check out the link in the show notes to register for the event. The space is available.

[00:00:30] The space is limited, so please go in early and register. Thanks, and let's get back to the show.

[00:00:37] Welcome back to Passive Income Pilots, everyone, and I hope you brought your astronaut helmets today. I've been a big space nerd for a long time. I don't know about you, Ryan.

[00:00:47] Who isn't a space nerd and who better to bring on the show than Colonel Collins, who is a astronaut and the first female shuttle commander to ever fly in space.

[00:00:57] And that's who we're bringing on the show today. And it was a fantastic interview. We got some great wisdom from her about leadership, risk management, how to raise a family and be an astronaut, all the things that it takes to be an astronaut, what you have to study in school, where you should go, the things that you should focus on.

[00:01:16] And hint, hint, hint, it's a lot of math and reading. So if you're listening to this, Quinn and Rowan, keep doing those math worksheets and the reading in school because it will pay off someday if you want to keep the astronaut option on the table.

[00:01:29] But it was really fun and enlightening and just inspiring to hear her stories.

[00:01:35] Unbelievably inspiring. Yeah, learned a lot. You can read between the lines and take a lot of things away in your personal life, in leadership for those of you who are flying the line. Just amazing.

[00:01:46] So Colonel Collins is a retired NASA astronaut, first and only female shuttle commander, total pioneer in aviation history.

[00:01:54] She has logged over 800 hours in space, been to the International Space Station and just unbelievably inspiring.

[00:02:03] So I've been looking forward to this interview for a very, very long time. Let's get into it. Let's get to the show.

[00:02:09] Welcome to Passive Income Pilots, where pilots upgrade their money.

[00:02:14] This is the definitive source for personal finance and investment tactics for aviators.

[00:02:20] We interview world-renowned experts and share these lessons with the flying community.

[00:02:25] So if you're ready for practical knowledge and insights, let's roll.

[00:02:29] Colonel Collins, absolute honor to have you on. Thank you for joining us.

[00:02:33] Hello. Well, thanks for having me on your show. Looking forward to it.

[00:02:37] We are too. Can we kick things off with, give us a little bit about your background, your incredible achievements,

[00:02:43] and then I'd love to get into your childhood and what it took you to get to where you were in space.

[00:02:51] My background. I don't like to talk about myself a lot. I like to talk about flying and all the great things that

[00:02:56] I'd say the flying world offers to people that want to be part of it.

[00:03:00] I started getting interested in flying, I think, because I grew up in Elmira, New York,

[00:03:05] which is the location of the National Soaring Museum.

[00:03:09] And the actual location is called Harris Hill.

[00:03:13] And there's a glider field where the tow planes take the gliders out over the Chemung Valley.

[00:03:19] And it's also where Schweitzer aircraft started building their gliders back, oh gosh,

[00:03:24] it's like almost 100 years ago.

[00:03:26] They started building gliders there.

[00:03:28] The Schweitzer 233 or 126, which are the ones I watched fly when I was a little kid.

[00:03:34] So I decided I wanted to be a pilot.

[00:03:36] Among other reasons, my dad took us to the airport and we would watch planes take off and land.

[00:03:41] The cheap entertainment.

[00:03:43] And I told my kids, you don't have to be in an expensive simulator to find out if you want to fly or not.

[00:03:49] You can just observe.

[00:03:50] So I think that is what got me interested in flying.

[00:03:54] And one other thing I'll say about that that's unique to my background is the fact that the military,

[00:04:01] the Navy and the Air Force started taking women into flight training in the 1970s.

[00:04:06] So it was 1974 that the Navy started taking women.

[00:04:10] In 1976 that the Air Force started taking women.

[00:04:14] It was actually a test program, but it would actually put them through military pilot training.

[00:04:18] And I graduated college in 1978.

[00:04:21] So I was in the first wave that went through in this test program.

[00:04:25] And I was actually in the first class of women at my base, which was Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma.

[00:04:30] There were four of us women on a base.

[00:04:33] So there must have been 500 pilots on the base.

[00:04:35] And we really stood out.

[00:04:37] But I would say that the women did the same as the men.

[00:04:41] Of the three of us, one of us didn't graduate.

[00:04:43] One of us graduated late.

[00:04:45] And two of us graduated on time.

[00:04:47] So we weren't given any special treatment.

[00:04:50] We were put through the program, seeing as everybody else.

[00:04:54] And I look back and I'm really happy that I was able to be part of that.

[00:04:58] That's great.

[00:04:59] You really had to climb through the ranks.

[00:05:02] I mean, you're completely self-made.

[00:05:05] You went to Stanford.

[00:05:06] You got into the academy.

[00:05:08] Can you talk about the grit and the determination that it took you to get there?

[00:05:13] You said in another interview that in, what, fifth grade or something, the teacher asked you to draw what you wanted to be when you grow up.

[00:05:21] And you drew an astronaut on the moon.

[00:05:22] And so you had that vision.

[00:05:24] Talk to you about the determination that it took to get there.

[00:05:27] Well, I think on determination, I think if a person has a passion for something, this kept ringing in my ears as I was growing up.

[00:05:35] Be a pilot.

[00:05:36] Be a pilot.

[00:05:36] I started reading books about pilots.

[00:05:40] And I think that was really what gave me the courage to try to be a pilot myself, was reading books.

[00:05:48] So I read books about all kinds of pilots, military, civilian, back in the early days in World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam.

[00:05:57] There weren't many books on astronauts yet, so I didn't quite make that leap.

[00:06:01] But I wanted to fly and reading about the courage of these pilots, the ones in the military, of course, but also the ones that flew around the world and flew into crazy places.

[00:06:13] They were explorers.

[00:06:15] I'm not going to say that I admire the bad weather that they flew into, but I would read about that also.

[00:06:22] So I encourage young people and, you know, even people my age to read books because it really opens up a whole new world.

[00:06:29] You know, put your phone down, go off into a nice quiet place and just get into a great story, an adventure about, and I like exploring.

[00:06:39] And I think my mom took us to the library.

[00:06:41] There were four of us kids in my family.

[00:06:43] And, of course, back in those days, you'd drop your kids off at the library and leave them in there for a couple hours.

[00:06:49] Nobody leaves their kids anymore nowadays.

[00:06:51] But I think the time that you spend with your kids in the library or helping them find the kind of books that inspire them is really important because it was for me.

[00:07:04] That's amazing.

[00:07:05] I don't know if that actually answered your question because you talked about determination, but I think when you read a biography of a – let's take Jackie Cochran, for example.

[00:07:13] So she was the woman that started the Women Air Force Service pilots during World War II, and she grew up with nothing.

[00:07:21] There's a book out about her.

[00:07:22] It's called The Stars at Noon.

[00:07:25] There's a couple books by that name, but the one about Jackie Cochran, The Stars at Noon, tells about her growing up with – she was dirt poor down in the southeast.

[00:07:35] She had nothing.

[00:07:36] She was able to become a pilot, and she had some help.

[00:07:42] She was a businesswoman, and I think her business mind helped her succeed in the world.

[00:07:47] But she was a role model for me.

[00:07:49] So I think that that question that you asked about determination, it really helps if there's somebody that you can see.

[00:07:57] And for me, I had a lot of men that were role models, too.

[00:07:59] It doesn't just have to be a woman or somebody that has the exact same background as you.

[00:08:03] I think anybody can be a good role model as long as your passions in life match up.

[00:08:10] And so that, I think, is the answer to the question, is study people that went before you that were successful and had the same – I'm going to say – passions as you and the same goals, or I'm going to say desired careers as you have.

[00:08:25] Actually, while we're on the topic of inspiring others, can we talk about your daughter?

[00:08:30] As a pilot, leaving on a five-day trip or a four-day trip or even a three-day trip to go somewhere is hard enough as a parent.

[00:08:36] What's it like blasting off into space and leaving your daughter behind?

[00:08:40] It is very hard.

[00:08:42] It is very hard.

[00:08:44] But I would remind myself that there's parents, moms and dads that go off in the military.

[00:08:50] They get deployed.

[00:08:51] That's much harder, in my opinion.

[00:08:54] Although, the risk in spaceflight – and I'll tell you about one of the missions I flew – but my daughter, Bridget, was – well, my first mission, I didn't have any kids.

[00:09:01] But then my second mission, she was one and a half.

[00:09:04] My third mission, she was three and a half.

[00:09:07] And then my last mission, she was nine years old.

[00:09:09] So by the time she was nine, she realized that there was a risk involved for astronauts going into space.

[00:09:16] And that was because when she was seven years old, we had the terrible Columbia accident.

[00:09:21] And you might remember the Space Shuttle Columbia was coming home from its two-week mission.

[00:09:25] This was in 2003.

[00:09:27] And they didn't realize it, but they had a hole in their left wing.

[00:09:30] It was either a crack open or a hole.

[00:09:35] The Space Shuttle gets very hot coming back.

[00:09:37] I mean, we heat up to almost 3,000 degrees on the nose in the leading edge of the wing.

[00:09:42] And that's because, obviously, we're going so fast.

[00:09:45] We're going Mach 25 when we reenter.

[00:09:49] That converts to something like 18,000 miles an hour if you could project it down to the surface.

[00:09:54] So we're coming back very fast, and this plasma heats up around the shuttle.

[00:09:58] Well, what happened during Columbia was they had the breach in the wing.

[00:10:03] They didn't know it, and those hot gases got in past the heat shield, melted the aluminum structure under the wing, and the wing broke off.

[00:10:14] And the seven astronauts perished in that accident.

[00:10:18] They were at 200,000 feet going like Mach 10 at the time of the accident.

[00:10:22] So they immediately died in that accident, and we completely lost Columbia.

[00:10:28] So my daughter, the day that accident happened, she was on a camping trip with my husband, her dad, somewhere actually quite close to the ground track of Columbia.

[00:10:39] They were up in East Texas.

[00:10:41] And the pieces of Columbia came down, they didn't have cell phone contact, and I kept trying to call it to get through to them, but they eventually heard about the accident and came home.

[00:10:51] And I tried to explain it to my daughter that she knew my flight was the next one going up.

[00:10:57] I mean, we were only five weeks from launch, and I was going up in Atlantis when Columbia perished.

[00:11:04] So I tried to explain to her that this wasn't meant to happen.

[00:11:08] It was truly an accident.

[00:11:11] I'm not going to fly again.

[00:11:12] I'm not going to go up in the space shuttle until we fix the problem.

[00:11:16] Well, being seven years old, I mean, she just didn't want to talk about it, and she was very scared for her mom.

[00:11:23] And so my other crew members also had children, and I had a four-year-old.

[00:11:27] My son was four years old at the time, but he couldn't quite process it the way a seven-year-old can.

[00:11:33] So actually, my son was two at the time.

[00:11:37] So I decided as the commander of the next mission that what I needed to do was communicate routinely with not only my kids,

[00:11:47] and my husband being an airline pilot, he understood, but I had six other crew members,

[00:11:53] many of whom were married and had their own kids.

[00:11:55] So we put a plan together to get our families together, to get them to know each other.

[00:12:02] We got them out to Johnson Space Center.

[00:12:04] We got them in the simulator.

[00:12:05] We had to come out to the pool to watch us do the spacewalks, practice spacewalks in the water.

[00:12:11] I went to our neutral buoyancy lab.

[00:12:13] We, you know, had them over to the house and tried to do the best I could to help them understand what the issues were

[00:12:23] and the fact that I'm not going to go fly, and neither is my crew, unless everything is to our satisfaction.

[00:12:29] It's still hard on the kids.

[00:12:31] It's still hard on the spouses, especially spouses who don't understand or who have not had a career in the flying world.

[00:12:39] I'm not saying they're not smart enough to understand.

[00:12:41] I'm just saying they haven't had the experience of knowing how risk management takes place before you decide to fly a mission.

[00:12:50] You go through a risk management process.

[00:12:53] And, of course, we as a crew had to say yes.

[00:12:56] And we did.

[00:12:57] And we flew the mission, and it was totally successful.

[00:13:01] I wasn't going to go unless I knew it was going to be successful.

[00:13:04] And we just moved on from there.

[00:13:06] And I decided to retire after that from the flying job.

[00:13:10] And I had flown the space shuttle four times.

[00:13:13] And by the way, this is an interesting fact.

[00:13:16] At the time I retired, which was 2006, the space shuttle program had 50 five-zero astronauts who hadn't even flown one mission yet.

[00:13:26] We had hired all these people to come in as astronauts.

[00:13:30] And then we had the accident, and there was no flying for two and a half years.

[00:13:35] So we had 50.

[00:13:37] And so I thought, do I need to stay and fly a fifth flight?

[00:13:41] We knew there were only 18 flights left until the end of the program.

[00:13:44] So I decided to retire and help the rookies get their chance at their first flight.

[00:13:52] And fortunately, the space shuttle program was able to fly every one of them before they shut the program down in 2011.

[00:14:00] And by the way, I think our country is better off with more people who've had that experience of being in space because we can go out and talk about it.

[00:14:08] And if you keep flying the same people over and over again, you don't really spread the wealth, spread that knowledge, and spread that experience.

[00:14:16] I think, not to get too far off the subject, but I think space tourism is going to be hugely successful someday because of their wonderful experience of just being in space.

[00:14:27] Because, you know, we're all working astronauts, but someday more and more people will be able to go up there not working, but just having a good time and going on vacation.

[00:14:38] And it's going to be fantastic.

[00:14:41] And so we're trying to, as we fly more and more, it gets safer, it gets cheaper, it's got to get safer, and it's got to get cheaper.

[00:14:48] But that will happen over the next several years and even decades.

[00:14:53] We're definitely going to get into that.

[00:14:54] That's been a dream of mine ever since I was a little kid.

[00:14:57] But I want to talk about that first flight.

[00:15:00] You know, I know that you were a test pilot for star lifters, C-141s, right?

[00:15:06] And the dream, you always had that dream to be an astronaut, right?

[00:15:10] So can we first talk about maybe moving from airplanes into, oh my God, I'm going to be an astronaut and the excitement around that, what the training was like,

[00:15:20] and then what is it like blasting off on that thing for the first time?

[00:15:24] Yeah, yeah.

[00:15:25] Well, I was assigned to the Air Force Test Pilot School out at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California in the high desert

[00:15:32] when I got the phone call from John Young, who, John Young was an astronaut.

[00:15:39] He's passed away now.

[00:15:40] But he was the commander of Apollo 16.

[00:15:43] He'd walk on the moon.

[00:15:45] And he also was the commander of the very first space shuttle flight.

[00:15:48] And he was one of my heroes.

[00:15:50] He called me and said to me, do you still want to be an astronaut?

[00:15:56] Of course, I had been through the interview at that time.

[00:15:58] And I'm like, yes, sir.

[00:16:01] Yes, I do.

[00:16:02] And he said, then he started into this long dissertation.

[00:16:06] He never actually said, we picked you to be an astronaut.

[00:16:09] He said, well, we have Johnson Space Center and we have simulators and we have mission control and we have the neutral Boise lab.

[00:16:18] And he's going on and on and on.

[00:16:19] And I was like, then he asked me if I had any questions.

[00:16:23] Now, I had interviewed as a pilot and a mission specialist.

[00:16:26] I actually had interviewed for a mission specialist.

[00:16:30] But they threw my name in the hat for pilot also.

[00:16:33] So when he asked me if I had any questions, I said, well, am I going to be a pilot or a mission specialist?

[00:16:38] And he said, pilot, you're going to be our first woman pilot of the space shuttle.

[00:16:44] And, you know, it's funny.

[00:16:47] It's kind of a strange reaction that I had.

[00:16:49] It wasn't like I wanted to jump up and down and go celebrate.

[00:16:53] It was like a weight off my shoulders.

[00:16:55] I felt like all these years I've been trying to get in the astronaut program and it finally happened.

[00:17:01] And they also told me not to talk about it until the announcement went out.

[00:17:05] So that was hard.

[00:17:07] Oh, my gosh.

[00:17:08] I really took it on as a challenge and an opportunity to, I want to say, do the best job I could and set a good example.

[00:17:16] Be the best pilot I could be.

[00:17:18] Be the best astronaut I could be.

[00:17:20] And not be distracted by things that aren't important.

[00:17:24] Because it's easy.

[00:17:25] I think, you know, being the first woman, it was easy to go off and try to promote myself and do public relations and public affairs.

[00:17:33] And I decided not to do that just to try to be the best pilot I could be and just constantly studying, practicing, getting extra simulators.

[00:17:43] And because it really is a challenge flying the space shuttle.

[00:17:47] The next question you asked me was about my first flight.

[00:17:50] I had to wait five years for my first flight, which almost five years, which nowadays they're waiting longer than five years.

[00:17:59] So being an astronaut isn't just flying.

[00:18:02] It's doing all the extra work in the office.

[00:18:04] So I was a Capcom in mission control.

[00:18:07] I worked down at Kennedy Space Center.

[00:18:09] I strapped crews in before they went up on their flights.

[00:18:12] I worked in orbiter engineering.

[00:18:14] So I did those three jobs while I was waiting to get assigned to my first flight.

[00:18:19] So there was a lot of impatience in me.

[00:18:22] I'm trying to, like, be as patient as I can.

[00:18:25] But it's difficult to wait.

[00:18:26] And I feel for the astronauts today that have to wait sometimes 10 years to get their first flight.

[00:18:31] But you got your foot in the door.

[00:18:33] But the actual first launch, I felt very prepared.

[00:18:38] We trained in a centrifuge to get the feel of what the G-force will be.

[00:18:43] We had a motion-based simulator, which you'd be shaking.

[00:18:47] You could hear what the engines were to sound like.

[00:18:50] You could see, like, night launch, the flashing of the reflection of the engines in the window.

[00:18:55] I would say the simulator prepared me very well for the experience.

[00:19:00] If you had not trained for a space launch and just got in a rocket and launched, you'd be scared to death.

[00:19:05] There's no doubt about it because it's such overwhelming sensory.

[00:19:09] Yeah, what's it like?

[00:19:10] All this shaking going on.

[00:19:12] Well, first aid when you're on the boosters.

[00:19:14] So the boosters are those two white rockets which are on the side of the fuel tank.

[00:19:19] Right.

[00:19:20] Those are solid rocket motors.

[00:19:22] So they are, that fuel is poured.

[00:19:25] Sometimes you get a more rocky flight from, depending on how they made them, and sometimes you get a smoother flight.

[00:19:32] But I will say that going through the jet stream, so we're pretty much going straight up by the time we go through the jet stream, 30 to 40, 45,000 feet.

[00:19:40] And there's a first aid is like an open loop feedback in their flight control system.

[00:19:46] And the shuttle is trying to maintain a specific attitude, and you're getting pushed around by the wind.

[00:19:52] And so the gimbals on those solid rocket motors are slamming.

[00:19:57] It's called rock and tilt, and they're slamming back and forth.

[00:20:01] And so you're like, your head's kind of slamming around.

[00:20:03] And especially in the winter, the four flights I flew, the February launch was the worst.

[00:20:08] And I attribute that to going through the jet stream.

[00:20:11] When those boosters fall off, you're at about 150,000 feet, Mach 5, your attitude is probably maybe 45 degrees or so, because now you're trying to go from vertical to horizontal.

[00:20:24] The boosters fall off, and the ride gets very smooth.

[00:20:27] You're just, it's like you're driving down the highway, nice and smooth.

[00:20:31] But in the south, all that noise goes away.

[00:20:34] But the biggest, I want to say, feeling that you get is from the G-force, and it's three Gs, which doesn't sound a lot for, like, if you're an F-16 pilot, you probably are flying the F-18.

[00:20:46] You're like, oh man, pulling five, nine Gs.

[00:20:49] That G vector in an airplane usually goes straight down through your spine.

[00:20:53] In the space shuttle, because you're laying on your back, the G vector goes through the chest.

[00:20:58] And so you're being pushed back in your seat.

[00:21:00] Three Gs.

[00:21:01] It's sustained from, you know, probably about four minutes to eight and a half minutes.

[00:21:06] And we can practice that in a centrifuge.

[00:21:08] So I don't think it's very, like, extremely hard on your body, but you need to, like, breathe.

[00:21:15] And if you're reaching for a switch or a checklist or a pencil, you need to be careful, because you can easily make a mistake.

[00:21:22] So those are, I think, the, how would it, yes, what does it feel like?

[00:21:27] It's the noise.

[00:21:28] Sounds like you're in a room that's birdie.

[00:21:30] There's the shaking.

[00:22:00] You're going forward because you're not stepping on the breaker.

[00:22:02] Like, if you step out of brake, you throw it, thrown forward.

[00:22:04] But there's no braking, obviously.

[00:22:06] So you go from three Gs instantly to zero G, and everything starts floating.

[00:22:12] I took my pencil out of my side pocket, and I let go of it, and it floated.

[00:22:18] I'm like, whoa, okay.

[00:22:20] They weren't kidding about the zero G thing.

[00:22:22] And the neck ring on my helmet came up around.

[00:22:25] I had to kind of pull it down so I could see my checklist.

[00:22:28] Checklist pages were fanning out.

[00:22:30] The tethers were floating.

[00:22:31] And because we were a night launch, we had some lights in the cockpit, and all this dust starts coming up.

[00:22:40] And it's like snow around you.

[00:22:43] And the sun starts coming in.

[00:22:47] And it looks like you're in a little bit of a snowstorm.

[00:22:49] But all that dust will be cleaned up later by the filters.

[00:22:53] So we didn't have that all the time.

[00:22:55] Oh, and the other thing I should tell you, Mike, this was funny.

[00:22:58] My flight engineer who was sitting behind me who had flown before, his name is Mike Fole.

[00:23:04] He said to me, Eileen, stop working so hard, you know, because I'm doing my, I got to tie two main buses together.

[00:23:11] I've got to purge the main propulsion system and vent that out.

[00:23:16] You don't want to blow up the end of the shuttle if you do that wrong.

[00:23:20] We all did that stuff manually.

[00:23:22] Now it's automatically.

[00:23:23] But back in those days, we did it manually.

[00:23:26] But Mike says to me, stop working so hard.

[00:23:28] Look out the window.

[00:23:31] You're going to see your first sunrise from space.

[00:23:34] Wow.

[00:23:34] And I looked out the window in front of me.

[00:23:37] And as a pilot, my whole life, I look at a flat horizon.

[00:23:40] But I look out the window and I thought, holy cow, the Earth is round.

[00:23:45] Look at that.

[00:23:46] And I'm like, whoa, the Earth is a little round.

[00:23:49] You heard it here first.

[00:23:50] The Earth is round.

[00:23:52] And so I actually still have people telling me they think the Earth is flat.

[00:23:56] I'm dead serious.

[00:23:58] And I'll tell you, nope.

[00:23:59] You can go around the Earth once every 90 minutes in the space shuttle and the space station.

[00:24:05] The Earth is definitely round.

[00:24:06] I, you know, of course, you're all pilots.

[00:24:08] You know that.

[00:24:09] But it's, it's funny that there's still.

[00:24:11] So I like to tell them that story.

[00:24:12] Yeah, it was, my first mission was not the most wonderful thing in the world because my

[00:24:20] first day or two, my body had to get used to being in zero gravity.

[00:24:23] And I tended to feel a little bit sick.

[00:24:25] I got the, what we call stomach awareness, a little bit of nausea, not only because of

[00:24:30] the fluid shift.

[00:24:31] So you get the fluid shift where your face gets really fat and your legs get really skinny.

[00:24:36] That's because the, what in your body is equalizing out with no gravity.

[00:24:40] And the second thing that happens is you could be working on something.

[00:24:45] Let's say you got a checklist in front of you and you're working and you look up and

[00:24:49] you're, the ceiling isn't above you anymore.

[00:24:51] It could be below you.

[00:24:53] It could be right, left.

[00:24:54] Like, where am I?

[00:24:55] And so that makes you disoriented.

[00:24:57] And that contributes a little bit to the nausea.

[00:24:59] I think about probably about half of the human population that's flown in space will get

[00:25:06] some form of stomach awareness.

[00:25:09] Some people have no effect at all.

[00:25:11] You don't know ahead of time because even people who are career pilots still get sick

[00:25:17] or get nauseous in space.

[00:25:19] And then you'll have some people who are scientists who've never, like I would say never flown,

[00:25:24] but who rarely flown until they train for the astronaut program.

[00:25:29] They'll go up there and they'll be fine.

[00:25:31] So I think they're trying to figure out like, what is it about a person's body that would

[00:25:36] make them sick versus not?

[00:25:38] So there's a lot of research going on.

[00:25:40] I'm getting a little bit off the subject there, but hopefully that answers your question.

[00:25:44] I could go on and on.

[00:25:45] What is it?

[00:25:45] What does it feel like?

[00:25:47] It is such a cool human experience.

[00:25:49] It's such an overwhelming new experience that, as I said before, space tourism will be successful

[00:25:59] because people are going to want to go up there and have that experience and learn about yourself.

[00:26:04] Look back at the earth from space.

[00:26:07] And just, I want to say, you know, have that wonderful experience.

[00:26:14] Now let's talk about coming back down.

[00:26:15] What's that like?

[00:26:16] Because you just described, I feel like I was in space with you, but what about coming

[00:26:21] down?

[00:26:21] I mean, what does that re-entry feel like?

[00:26:23] I feel like we're floating at the top and now we're, you know, what kind of emotions

[00:26:28] and physical feelings do you have there?

[00:26:30] Yeah.

[00:26:31] Kind of depends on how long you've been up there.

[00:26:32] So I did it.

[00:26:33] My shortest mission was five days and I won't go into the reason why, but we had a technical

[00:26:39] reason why we were only five days and my longest mission was 15 days.

[00:26:43] And now the astronauts on the space station are doing six months and sometimes a year.

[00:26:48] So it depends on how long you've been up there, but I can give you my experience.

[00:26:52] I would say the older you get, the easier it is to go up, but the harder it is to come back.

[00:27:00] When I came back from my first mission, I was 38 years old and I had no problem readapting.

[00:27:05] My last mission, I was 48 and I had a harder time adapting, even though I had been exercising.

[00:27:12] Because I think as you get older, it's really your heart trying to pump the blood again,

[00:27:17] because your heart can get very lazy up there.

[00:27:20] Your muscles get atrophy.

[00:27:23] We exercise a lot more nowadays to prevent that atrophy.

[00:27:27] Yeah.

[00:27:28] Did you have workout equipment on the shuttle like they do on the space station?

[00:27:33] Yeah, we did.

[00:27:34] So on the shuttle, we always took up a bicycle.

[00:27:38] We called it ergometer, but we had a bicycle ergometer.

[00:27:42] The problem with the shuttle is our missions were short.

[00:27:45] They were so packed that when you got to your exercise period, a lot of my crew members would

[00:27:50] like, I'm not going to exercise.

[00:27:52] Are you okay if I don't exercise?

[00:27:54] I'm behind on this whatever they're doing.

[00:27:56] Right.

[00:27:57] And I'd say, that was fine.

[00:27:59] I, you know, I'm not going to tell my crew they have to exercise.

[00:28:02] I exercised every day because I knew that I'm going to, I was going to land the shuttle.

[00:28:07] I had to be in tip top shape to land the shuttle.

[00:28:11] So I exercised every day.

[00:28:13] We had the bicycle ergometer.

[00:28:14] We also, on two of my missions, took up a treadmill.

[00:28:17] And that was, the treadmill was an experiment to kind of work out the bugs before it went

[00:28:23] on the space station.

[00:28:24] In the treadmill, you have those bungee cords or you have like straps on your shoulder to

[00:28:28] hold you down and on your waist.

[00:28:30] And the treadmill, I think worked pretty good.

[00:28:34] And I think, I think that, you know, not just the cardiovascular benefit that we got from

[00:28:41] the treadmill, but the fact that when you put some weight on your shoulders, on your hips,

[00:28:46] that helps your bones, I would say, by putting a little bit of pressure on them.

[00:28:52] Because I think if you can keep some pressure on your bones, it will help the astronaut from

[00:28:58] losing calcium or getting brittle bones by just like floating like a jellyfish all the

[00:29:04] time near like a big blob up there.

[00:29:06] Your bones are going to start losing strength.

[00:29:08] They're going to lose calcium.

[00:29:09] They're going to lose some of their inner structure.

[00:29:12] So we, we do treadmill.

[00:29:14] We do ergometer.

[00:29:15] We also had this great exercise device called A-RED.

[00:29:18] It used to be I-RED, but now it's A-RED.

[00:29:22] Everything in NASSIS acronyms.

[00:29:24] It stands for infant resistive exercise device, A-R-E-D.

[00:29:28] And it's like a bunch of bungee cords and you can hang like a bat from the ceiling and just

[00:29:32] do your, oh my, it is the greatest exercise device.

[00:29:36] I love that thing.

[00:29:38] I just felt great in there.

[00:29:40] To get to, you know, after floating around, you've like,

[00:29:43] get some tension on your legs, limbs, and your spine.

[00:29:47] It actually feels good.

[00:29:50] And I, uh, the astronauts still have a version of that device on the space station.

[00:29:55] So they're coming back today in much better shape.

[00:29:58] Back in the early days of the shuttle program, we didn't know.

[00:30:01] So we were coming back.

[00:30:02] Some astronauts would get very lightheaded.

[00:30:05] I don't know if anyone fainted, but if, if they did, I wouldn't be surprised.

[00:30:09] Because when you, after you've been floating in zero G, your head gets used to being,

[00:30:13] you know, hydrated, you come back to earth, you've got gravity pulling everything back

[00:30:17] down to your feet.

[00:30:18] You're going to get lightheaded.

[00:30:20] About halfway through the shuttle program, we started, um, before we, before coming home,

[00:30:25] we would drink salt water.

[00:30:26] And I had to drink 24 ounces.

[00:30:28] Some of the guys would drink 32 ounces just to hydrate, to prevent this lightheadedness.

[00:30:34] If you had to do an emergency evacuation after landing, you don't want your, half your crew

[00:30:39] fainting because now you got to drive them out and you're not feeling that great either.

[00:30:44] So we call these things countermeasures.

[00:30:47] So the countermeasures that we had, the exercise, the drink of the salt water, now they have more,

[00:30:53] uh, because the space station astronauts are up there for so long.

[00:30:57] The astronauts today are coming back in much better shape than they did 10, 20 years ago

[00:31:02] because we've learned and I could keep going, but I'll send it back.

[00:31:07] No, this is amazing.

[00:31:08] I'm really interested in some of the leadership things that you did as a commander and asking you

[00:31:16] how we can prepare, better prepare leaders today.

[00:31:20] And I also like kind of a two-part question.

[00:31:22] How do you become an astronaut?

[00:31:24] Like what trajectory would you be on today?

[00:31:26] I know the space shuttle program, you know, 2011, it was kind of put aside and now it's kind

[00:31:31] of private space travel, but if you could kind of speak to what qualities and what things

[00:31:37] you did to become a leader, that would be very helpful for me.

[00:31:40] And then, and then kind of what opportunities are in the space program today?

[00:31:43] Yes.

[00:31:44] I love the question on leadership.

[00:31:45] I was in the military.

[00:31:47] I was an instructor pilot.

[00:31:49] I flew some action.

[00:31:50] C-141.

[00:31:51] I had the opportunity to be an aircraft commander on the C-141.

[00:31:54] Um, I taught, taught mathematics at the Air Force Academy.

[00:31:57] You know, teachers are leaders in a different way, but there's different types of leadership

[00:32:04] positions.

[00:32:05] And then, of course, you have different types of leadership styles.

[00:32:09] And I think as a person grows up, they're learning about themselves and everybody has

[00:32:15] leadership qualities, I believe.

[00:32:17] But I think for me that there was a challenge in that I was a woman and really a man's world

[00:32:23] back in 1979 when I became an instructor pilot.

[00:32:27] I was assigned three students and I was the first woman to be an instructor pilot at my

[00:32:33] base advance.

[00:32:34] So I felt that I, I might possibly have had a credibility issue.

[00:32:37] I didn't want to dwell on that.

[00:32:39] But what I did was study so much.

[00:32:44] I wanted to be an expert on the airplane.

[00:32:46] I wanted to be an expert on all the maneuvers that we had to fly, all the regulations I

[00:32:52] just studied because I believe the first step in leadership is knowledge.

[00:32:56] And back when I was in the military, I remember we learned three essential, right?

[00:33:01] There's so much you could talk about leadership, but the three essential things, the first one

[00:33:04] is knowledge because no one's going to follow you if you don't know what you're doing or

[00:33:07] you don't know what you're talking about.

[00:33:09] Like, so the first is knowledge.

[00:33:11] The second one is communicating.

[00:33:12] So you must be able to communicate with people at their level and, you know, talking to my

[00:33:19] students, you know, not using acronyms the first day they walk in the door, but try to

[00:33:24] communicate to them and get them up to speed.

[00:33:27] And there's so much more I could say about communicating.

[00:33:29] It includes listening, how to listen because communication goes both ways.

[00:33:34] And then the third thing is integrity.

[00:33:35] And I mean, if you are cheating or breaking the rules or, you know, lying or whatever,

[00:33:42] you're going to lose your credibility as a leader.

[00:33:44] So I tried like those three things throughout my career to focus on that.

[00:33:48] I mean, there's so many other things we could talk about.

[00:33:50] And by the way, when I went through the Air Force test pilot school, they made me the class

[00:33:54] leader because I had C and ranking officers.

[00:33:57] So here I am, I'm a cargo pilot who's C-141s and I'm only the second woman pilot to go through

[00:34:04] the school.

[00:34:05] And I have a class of 25, 25 of us and more than half of them are fighter pilots.

[00:34:11] I'm like, do I have any credibility with these guys?

[00:34:14] So I think from my leadership technique, there was the first thing was assign everybody a job

[00:34:21] because I can't do it all.

[00:34:22] So like, okay, who's going to be, you know, put them in charge of different, different,

[00:34:26] I didn't, I asked him, what would you like to do?

[00:34:28] We, I'd like everybody to volunteer for something.

[00:34:30] But I think being the class leader at the test pilot school, it was more about listening.

[00:34:35] And I told my class, I'm not going to try to run the show.

[00:34:39] We're all here to graduate.

[00:34:41] I'm here if you have problems.

[00:34:42] If you got a problem, come and talk to me.

[00:34:44] I'll take it to the commandant of the school.

[00:34:46] And the other thing was, we all need to work together.

[00:34:49] I want every single one of us to graduate and we need to help each other.

[00:34:52] We're a team.

[00:34:53] We're not competing.

[00:34:54] We're a team.

[00:34:55] So I tried to, and then I just stepped back and kind of watched these happen.

[00:35:00] I have made mistakes as a leader by trying to tell people to do too much.

[00:35:04] That doesn't work.

[00:35:05] It backfires.

[00:35:06] And fortunately, I had guys come up to me and say, Eileen, you're trying too hard.

[00:35:10] Just back off.

[00:35:11] And I'm like, hey, that's good feedback.

[00:35:14] So I'm just trying to do my job and that's good feedback.

[00:35:19] So there's so much more I could say about leadership, but I'll leave it at that.

[00:35:24] And then I think your second question was about becoming an astronaut today.

[00:35:28] It is a little bit different today.

[00:35:29] So when I applied to the shuttle program in 1990, if you were a military pilot, you really

[00:35:35] had a leg up getting selected into the program, whether you became a shuttle pilot commander

[00:35:40] or a mission specialist.

[00:35:41] And I think that was because of the experience people get in the military or extremely well

[00:35:48] prepared to jump into the space shuttle program, which was not a military program.

[00:35:53] But I think there was a little bit of the culture was derived from the way things work in the

[00:35:59] military as far as, you know, how you do your job, how you interact with each other.

[00:36:04] Today, the big difference, well, our astronauts go up in the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX rocket in

[00:36:10] the Dragon capsule is where they sit on the top.

[00:36:13] We're still flying with Russia.

[00:36:15] So we go over to Star City and we train to launch on the Soyuz.

[00:36:21] And eventually the Boeing Starliner will be on board.

[00:36:25] Those aircraft are so automated.

[00:36:28] We don't have to train to land anymore.

[00:36:31] Like in the shuttle program, we flew the shuttle from, you know, 50,000 feet down.

[00:36:35] I mean, every shuttle flight was landed by the commander.

[00:36:38] We had no auto land.

[00:36:40] We tried auto land.

[00:36:41] It just wasn't a very good system.

[00:36:43] But we had to know how to fly.

[00:36:45] And today, because the technology, the spacecraft are so automated, they can fly themselves like

[00:36:54] many of the new airliners.

[00:36:56] If you have a malfunction, it can fix itself.

[00:36:58] You don't have as many emergency procedures to train for as you did in the shuttle program.

[00:37:04] And you don't really, and this is my opinion, but you don't really have to be a pilot to be

[00:37:09] a commander of a spacecraft.

[00:37:12] And we can see that now, especially on the space station, because you don't fly the space

[00:37:16] station.

[00:37:17] It's kind of, it's in orbit, right?

[00:37:18] It does, it does a couple maneuvers to avoid debris, but basically it's just in orbit.

[00:37:24] It doesn't like, you don't have to fly it anywhere.

[00:37:27] So you don't really need the flying skills.

[00:37:29] But I think the three elements I talked about, a leadership, those are things that the astronaut

[00:37:33] program is looking for.

[00:37:35] Knowledge of your job.

[00:37:37] Whatever you're doing, be very good at what you're doing.

[00:37:40] And the second one is communicating.

[00:37:42] If you can show the astronaut selection board that you are a good communicator by the things

[00:37:47] you've done in the past, maybe you've had leadership positions, maybe you know language,

[00:37:52] and then integrity.

[00:37:53] That's the hardest thing.

[00:37:54] It's very hard to evaluate that.

[00:37:57] So what the astronaut board does is they call, they don't just talk to your, you know,

[00:38:03] you have to give like, you know, three letters or three people to recommend you.

[00:38:06] But to call people that are your peers or call people that work for you, what kind of boss

[00:38:12] was this person?

[00:38:13] Do you think this person would make a good astronaut?

[00:38:15] So you want to talk to people that were maybe junior to you because they didn't really find

[00:38:20] out more about the person.

[00:38:22] And then we test.

[00:38:24] There's so much more testing.

[00:38:25] It's a week-long interview process.

[00:38:28] And they test all kinds of things that psychology, like testing and personality, character testing.

[00:38:34] And then they test hand-eye coordination by using robotic.

[00:38:38] You can do like these robotic exams.

[00:38:43] And it's much harder to get in today because so many young people say, oh, what do I need

[00:38:48] to do to be an astronaut?

[00:38:49] Oh, maybe I'll get scuba certified.

[00:38:51] Scuba certified.

[00:38:52] Oh, maybe I'll get my pilot's license.

[00:38:55] Oh, maybe I'll get a glider license.

[00:38:56] Maybe I'll fly a helicopter.

[00:38:58] Maybe I'll learn a language.

[00:39:00] Maybe I'll work overseas for a while in one of the countries that are part of the International

[00:39:05] Space Station.

[00:39:06] So they do all these little extra things to make your application stand out.

[00:39:10] So I think it's harder.

[00:39:11] Oh, and now you have to have a master's degree to be a NASA astronaut.

[00:39:15] So it's very, very, very competitive.

[00:39:19] Right.

[00:39:20] Nowadays, there's commercial astronauts.

[00:39:21] So you can fly for AXIOM space.

[00:39:26] But there's actually two former NASA astronauts that are now civilian astronauts with them.

[00:39:32] And I think as we go into the future, you're going to see more non-NASA.

[00:39:39] And by astronaut, I mean a career professional person.

[00:39:43] I mean, if you go up into space one time, does that make you an astronaut?

[00:39:47] Eh, not really a professional astronaut.

[00:39:50] But for professional astronauts, you're going to see that career.

[00:39:53] You're going to see it grow.

[00:39:55] And I don't think they'll be needing the flying skills.

[00:39:59] If you have flying skills, that stands out on your application because it shows you have

[00:40:03] good anti-coordination.

[00:40:04] You have situational awareness.

[00:40:06] You have judgment.

[00:40:08] Maybe you've handled emergencies.

[00:40:09] You have that ability to think while everything around you is falling apart.

[00:40:13] Those are the kind of skills that I think the astronaut selection board can see if you are a pilot or if you've been in the military.

[00:40:23] That's amazing.

[00:40:23] One question I have, I mean, right after the Columbia disaster, you commanded that next flight.

[00:40:29] And you mentioned that, you know, the families were concerned.

[00:40:33] Your kids were concerned.

[00:40:35] And you said kind of how you responded.

[00:40:38] And, you know, you ensured everybody that the space shuttle was ready to go and that the checks were done.

[00:40:44] But how are you feeling?

[00:40:46] What gave you the confidence to lead through that?

[00:40:49] Because that is a very tricky situation.

[00:40:53] And, you know, we're all leaders, you know, of our flight deck and our planes and our companies.

[00:40:59] And, I mean, it doesn't make us not human, right?

[00:41:03] I mean, you probably had some doubts maybe, potentially.

[00:41:06] Or did you?

[00:41:08] Or how did you get through that?

[00:41:09] Because that must have been very challenging for you to get the confidence to know that everything was okay

[00:41:15] and then lead your team through that.

[00:41:17] I mean, that's very fascinating.

[00:41:18] Yeah, the accident happened on a Saturday morning.

[00:41:22] I thought an APU, Auxiliary Power Unit, I thought an APU blew up.

[00:41:28] I was wrong.

[00:41:29] We found out, actually, within a couple of days, people started saying there was a breach in the wing.

[00:41:35] I, it was a very slow process, I would say.

[00:41:38] It was February, too, so it was cold and the weather was bad.

[00:41:41] And now we're sending people up to East Texas to pick up the pieces.

[00:41:45] I mean, I think, first of all, I was busy.

[00:41:48] So that part was good.

[00:41:52] I wanted to stay busy.

[00:41:53] I didn't want to just go and sulk somewhere.

[00:41:56] I attended the memorial services of my friends.

[00:41:59] And you have to get through that grieving process.

[00:42:03] And that took about 10 days or so for the memorial services.

[00:42:07] But the grieving process goes on.

[00:42:10] You know, it actually never goes away.

[00:42:12] It just, you know, eventually it becomes less of your daily mindset.

[00:42:16] So we got through that.

[00:42:18] But I had to remind myself right away, I'm the commander of the next flight.

[00:42:23] Maybe NASA will take me off the flight.

[00:42:26] Maybe put somebody else on it.

[00:42:28] Well, they didn't.

[00:42:28] Thank you very much.

[00:42:29] I wanted to command that flight.

[00:42:32] We had trained for over a year.

[00:42:34] We were only five weeks from launch.

[00:42:36] I wanted to stay with my mission and fly it.

[00:42:39] But I knew people were relying on me.

[00:42:41] And people were going to look up to me for any kind of confidence or doubts or what kind of energy do I have?

[00:42:50] You know, what is my mindset?

[00:42:52] So I decided right away that I was going to be in this readership mode.

[00:42:59] And I was not going to complain or gripe or talk bad with people or speculate about the accident.

[00:43:07] I was going to be a listener and I was going to try to help people that were struggling emotionally.

[00:43:13] So I kind of took on that role.

[00:43:15] I also remember right after the accident happened, I called all of my crew members, called them up and just talked to them.

[00:43:23] I also called my mom and dad and I said, cancel your airline tickets.

[00:43:28] I'm not going to launch next month.

[00:43:31] And I talked them through it because they were obviously upset.

[00:43:35] And then, of course, my family, I talked about them.

[00:43:39] I went to my training manager on Monday morning.

[00:43:41] He works for me because my job as a commander is to make sure that my crew is trained for the mission that we're supposed to be executing.

[00:43:49] That we do it safely and successfully.

[00:43:52] So I went to my training manager Monday morning and I said to him, I was surprised at myself, but I said, I'm going to fly this mission if it takes five years.

[00:44:00] I'm not leaving.

[00:44:01] I'm not quitting.

[00:44:03] And I see that was the attitude I took through the whole thing is that I didn't want them to cancel the shuttle program.

[00:44:12] There was talk about, oh, we've killed two crews now.

[00:44:14] Let's cancel the shuttle.

[00:44:15] And I went in with, if we cancel the program, that means their deaths were for nothing.

[00:44:22] Did they die for a program that wasn't worth continuing?

[00:44:26] And we decided we needed the shuttle to finish building the space station.

[00:44:31] So in the astronaut office had a lot of input into this decision.

[00:44:36] We decided to keep flying the shuttle until the space station was complete.

[00:44:40] And that was going to take another five, eight years, whatever.

[00:44:44] And after that, we were building new spacecraft to shuttle us back and forth.

[00:44:48] And that is what we're doing now in the SpaceX Falcon 9.

[00:44:53] So I think that's the answer to your question.

[00:44:56] There's a lot more to it than just that because there were, after the accident, there were arguments.

[00:45:01] There were people that were getting mad at each other.

[00:45:04] And this didn't happen right away.

[00:45:06] This would happen like months down the line.

[00:45:08] And a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were short.

[00:45:11] We didn't have all the resources we wanted.

[00:45:13] We knew we had to fix.

[00:45:15] Why do we have a hole in the wing?

[00:45:17] Well, a piece of foam fell off the fuel tank on Columbia on their launch.

[00:45:22] So we had to figure out how to stop foam from falling.

[00:45:25] Ice, other things, everything.

[00:45:27] Launch vehicles have all kinds of garbage fall off of them.

[00:45:30] Just watch it closely sometime.

[00:45:33] And if we do have damage, how do we fix it while we're up in space?

[00:45:37] And the third is, how do we even know if we have damage?

[00:45:41] Because the Columbia crew didn't know they had damage on their wing.

[00:45:45] So those were the three main goals that the program took on.

[00:45:50] And I wanted to help support that in any way that I could.

[00:45:54] So I would attend meetings.

[00:45:56] I would try to be very positive.

[00:45:59] When people came up with ideas, I'd always say, hey, that's a great idea.

[00:46:03] Might not be able to do it, but, you know, let's investigate that.

[00:46:06] There wasn't enough money to investigate everyone's idea.

[00:46:09] And that's where people would get upset if their project, you know, we're at a point right now

[00:46:15] where we don't have enough money to keep doing all these ideas.

[00:46:18] We need to kind of down select.

[00:46:21] And I would find myself saying, you know, I'm sorry that your idea, your project was canceled,

[00:46:27] but now we need you to get on board with this other one.

[00:46:29] We need to help.

[00:46:30] We need you on board with this one that they were originally competing with.

[00:46:34] There were many different ideas on how to repair and without going to a whole other dissertation,

[00:46:40] the Accident Board, which is called the CAIB, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board,

[00:46:44] C-A-I-B.

[00:46:45] You can look them up.

[00:46:46] They were, the report is online.

[00:46:48] It's actually pretty interesting.

[00:46:50] They blamed the culture at NASA just as much as the hole in the wing for causing the accident.

[00:46:56] That was very hard for all of us to take.

[00:46:58] And I thought I worked in the best culture around.

[00:47:02] I thought, you know, we had a great mission.

[00:47:03] We had great teams.

[00:47:05] We had smart people.

[00:47:07] But apparently there was stuff going on that the astronauts didn't know about.

[00:47:11] I think what happens as an astronaut, when you walk into a room, you know, people like,

[00:47:15] oh, everything's great here.

[00:47:17] And you need to ask questions.

[00:47:21] Because a few people might, but people aren't just going to approach you and say,

[00:47:25] hey, we got a real problem here.

[00:47:26] So we have to go, like we go out to the factories, go out to the offices and say,

[00:47:31] how's everything going here?

[00:47:33] Or is there a better way to do what you're doing?

[00:47:35] Are you got any frustrations?

[00:47:37] I mean, I start asking questions.

[00:47:38] And it's amazing what you can find out if you ask those kind of questions.

[00:47:42] And some people will just start telling you about, oh, yeah, you know, this.

[00:47:47] And I think we learned a lot that way.

[00:47:49] And the final thing is, you asked, was I confident enough to fly?

[00:47:54] We had the ability to say, we're not going to fly unless you fix that.

[00:47:58] And there were about seven other things that did not cause the accident that we thought needed

[00:48:03] to be fixed.

[00:48:04] There were the hold down posts.

[00:48:06] They pulled the shuttle down on the pad.

[00:48:07] There was, I mean, I won't go into all the problems with the rudder speed brake actuator.

[00:48:13] And there were more.

[00:48:15] But I would say, you got to fix this because my crew is not going to accept this.

[00:48:20] And so we got these things fixed that we really didn't have the money or the time to fix earlier.

[00:48:25] So that's, I could keep going on and on, but I think those are pretty much like the highlights,

[00:48:29] maybe the executive summary.

[00:48:31] This is so good.

[00:48:32] No, there's so many lessons here for, you know, line pilots, for business owners.

[00:48:37] There's so much wisdom here for leadership.

[00:48:40] I'm dying to jump in, but Ryan, you got something?

[00:48:42] I know you really wanted to talk about the future of private space travel.

[00:48:47] So take us into that.

[00:48:48] This has been a dream of mine ever since as a kid was to go into orbit.

[00:48:52] It's just, I could never see a line of sight to it.

[00:48:55] It wasn't something that I was dedicated enough to pursue.

[00:48:59] But man, would I love to buy a ticket and either go up into space like a bottle rocket

[00:49:05] or even better into orbit.

[00:49:06] What are the chances that I'm going to be able to afford that in my lifetime?

[00:49:11] Yeah, well, okay.

[00:49:13] So I'm not sure if you're going to be able to afford it.

[00:49:16] I mean, I don't know if there's a yes or no to that, but I can definitely say,

[00:49:20] well, first of all, the foundation is commercial space flight is essential for the United States

[00:49:26] to stay a leader in space exploration.

[00:49:30] It is essential.

[00:49:31] And the commercial companies in their government, which is NASA, are together.

[00:49:36] We're a team.

[00:49:37] Some people get this feeling that, oh, NASA's competing with SpaceX.

[00:49:41] Absolutely not.

[00:49:42] NASA and SpaceX work together as a team.

[00:49:45] In fact, when SpaceX got started back sometime, I don't know, it was 2002, 2004 timeframe,

[00:49:50] somewhere back in there, they got NASA contracts to take cargo to the space station and then

[00:49:55] to take astronauts.

[00:49:57] We have shared with SpaceX our ground facilities, much of our hardware, software.

[00:50:02] Many of the people that worked at NASA have gone to work at SpaceX.

[00:50:06] We share knowledge and it's just a great partnership.

[00:50:11] That's wonderful.

[00:50:12] We are not competing with SpaceX.

[00:50:14] I think that some people believe that, but I think, no, the house needs to be united

[00:50:19] because China will take their astronauts to the moon.

[00:50:25] China could very well land astronauts at the south pole of the moon

[00:50:28] before the United States gets back there.

[00:50:30] So we need to work with commercial.

[00:50:32] Now, this is good for people like you and me that they're like, oh, maybe I want to go

[00:50:35] in space someday because the more flying, the more launches and the more space flights,

[00:50:42] it will get safer and it will get cheaper.

[00:50:45] And that's just the story of economics, right?

[00:50:47] You got to have scale.

[00:50:48] You got to keep doing more and more of it.

[00:50:50] And nowadays with artificial intelligence coming on board, to me, AI is data.

[00:50:56] You need more and more data.

[00:50:57] Well, one thing we really don't have in human space flight is a lot of data.

[00:51:00] You've got to fly more and you've got to learn the other things, learn about the environment.

[00:51:05] It's not just the spacecraft.

[00:51:07] You're about how does that interact with the environment.

[00:51:09] So as things get safer, it's hard for me to give you a time frame on this,

[00:51:13] but it will get safer and it will get cheaper and more people will have the opportunity to fly.

[00:51:20] So maybe in five years, you know, depending on how much income you've had,

[00:51:24] you may not be able to afford it in five years, but in 20 years, hmm, it could be very likely in 20 years.

[00:51:31] Right.

[00:51:31] I remember back when I was a kid, nobody was going on cruise ships in my hometown.

[00:51:37] Like that was like, oh, that's what rich people do.

[00:51:39] Now, like everybody goes on cruise ships.

[00:51:41] It's obviously not as risky, but I think with Blue Origin doing their suborbital flights,

[00:51:47] and you see these Michael Strahan and William Shatner and these people like going up on suborbital 11 minute flight.

[00:51:55] If you go over 50 miles, it's considered space.

[00:51:58] So that's kind of the line.

[00:51:59] SpaceX goes to orbit, which is around the Earth.

[00:52:02] Those are a minimum of at least 90 minute flights to go around.

[00:52:07] Those orbital flights are more risky because you need a heat shield.

[00:52:11] If you're going around the Earth, you need a heat shield to get back through the atmosphere.

[00:52:15] And then you've got the deep space, which is going to the moon and Mars, and that's much farther off.

[00:52:21] So if you look at space flight, to answer your question, I like to divide it up into three areas.

[00:52:26] There's suborbital, which is up and down, 11, 15 minutes.

[00:52:31] There's orbital, which is a go around the Earth, at least 90 minutes for one orbit.

[00:52:36] And the third is deep space.

[00:52:38] Going to the moon, it takes three days to get to the moon.

[00:52:41] Mars takes six months to get to Mars with conventional chemical propulsion.

[00:52:46] You would be much more likely to do the suborbital flights because they're, I'm going to say, much less expensive and probably more safe.

[00:52:55] Yeah.

[00:52:55] And then as you go farther, they get riskier.

[00:52:57] So I guess that's kind of a short answer to the question.

[00:53:00] I really wish for people to want to invest in commercial space.

[00:53:03] I would not make a recommendation because this is so hard to predict.

[00:53:09] It is long, long, long term.

[00:53:11] So I would only invest if it was like long term.

[00:53:15] I mean, you could be an accident tomorrow.

[00:53:17] And if there's an accident, that's going to be very bad.

[00:53:21] So on many different levels.

[00:53:23] So any investment in space to me is very long term.

[00:53:26] So to take this home, let's talk about the reentry.

[00:53:30] You're going 18,000 miles an hour sideways, which is what keeps you in orbit.

[00:53:35] What's the deceleration phase look like?

[00:53:37] How quickly do you go from deceleration to hitting the atmosphere?

[00:53:42] What's that like?

[00:53:44] Coming back from low Earth orbit, which you were at the space station is, normally you

[00:53:48] will do a deorbit burn all the way over like on the other side of where you're going to

[00:53:52] land, the other side of the planet.

[00:53:54] So in the space shuttle, like let's say you're going along with your nose in the velocity vector.

[00:53:58] We have to flip the shuttle around so the back of the shuttle is in the velocity vector

[00:54:03] and you fire your engines into the velocity vector.

[00:54:06] That's a retrograde burn, deorbit burn.

[00:54:10] That will actually lower your perigee.

[00:54:11] In reality, what it does, you're going to start dropping.

[00:54:14] And so then after we do the deorbit burn, you flip the shuttle back around and we reenter

[00:54:20] the atmosphere at a 40 degree angle of attack.

[00:54:23] And so that would be the relative wind versus the axis of the shuttle.

[00:54:28] 40 degrees nose up.

[00:54:29] Yes.

[00:54:30] 40 degrees nose up from the relative wind.

[00:54:33] So you're coming back at a very high nose angle.

[00:54:36] That way is you hit those, like where are we?

[00:54:39] And we're up at about, oh gosh, I'm trying to remember how high we are when we do the deorbit

[00:54:45] burn, but we're up at like 200 miles or so.

[00:54:50] So you've got a long way to come down.

[00:54:51] So as you start coming down in altitude, you start picking up the atmosphere and you're

[00:54:59] going so fast initially, Mach 25, you're hitting the molecules in the upper atmosphere.

[00:55:07] And those molecules are, I mean, it kind of rips the electrons off and this plasma develops

[00:55:13] around you and it's kind of greenish, yellowish color in the windows.

[00:55:18] And it's almost like you're coming through a fire.

[00:55:21] It's kind of spooky, but it's very smooth.

[00:55:23] Coming back is very, very smooth.

[00:55:25] And the shuttle would bank and like an airplane, when you bank, you would turn.

[00:55:32] But in the shuttle, when you bank, you just keep going straight, but you're in a bank angle.

[00:55:36] And that helps you descend a little bit faster.

[00:55:40] And you just gradually slow down because of friction of the upper atmosphere.

[00:55:45] And then we start picking up nav aids, like we'll use GPS.

[00:55:49] We'll use, we actually used to use TACAN stations in the shuttle program, microwave landing system.

[00:55:54] We pick up once we roll out on final.

[00:55:57] But so we gradually slow down.

[00:56:00] The shuttle doesn't have engines, so to speak, coming home.

[00:56:05] So you can't go around.

[00:56:07] I mean, your first shot at the runway is your only shot, but we still have to control energy.

[00:56:13] So we use the speed brake, which is up on the rudder.

[00:56:15] We would use the speed brake to modulate our energy.

[00:56:18] And you would want to hit like right over your landing runway in about 50,000 feet.

[00:56:23] That's where your Mach 1, you hear the boom, boom.

[00:56:26] You got two shock waves that one comes off the nose, one comes off the wings.

[00:56:30] And if you're on the ground, you'll hear a boom, boom, as the shock wave separates from the shuttle.

[00:56:36] And at that point, the commander takes over and we fly a heading alignment cone, which is like a big circle.

[00:56:41] And you want that big circle.

[00:56:43] So again, you can modulate the energy.

[00:56:45] So if it turns out you're a little bit low, you can cut the circle off.

[00:56:48] If you're a little bit high, you can put the speed brake out.

[00:56:51] And so you just come out, pick up the MLS.

[00:56:53] And we also had a ball bar, which is used on Navy ships.

[00:56:57] It's a very similar, I want to say, landing aid.

[00:57:01] We had Pappy lights coming down final approach to put us on a 20-degree glide slope.

[00:57:09] So we would do a three-flare to go from a 20-degree, I mean, most airplanes fly three to three.

[00:57:16] Three degrees.

[00:57:16] But if you're coming down at four, you know, if you fly an ILS that's 3.8, it feels like it's super steep.

[00:57:22] So, I mean, that must just look like you're just pointing it straight at the ground.

[00:57:27] It's like a bombing run.

[00:57:28] Like we would practice those in the A7.

[00:57:30] And you just, it's like you're aiming at your target and you pickle off a bomb.

[00:57:34] But so we were aiming 7,500 feet short of the runway, coming down at a 20-degree glide slope, 300 knots, modulating the speed brake.

[00:57:43] When you get to 3,000 feet...

[00:57:44] Do you remember what your vertical speed rate was?

[00:57:46] The vertical, it was pegged.

[00:57:48] You know, I don't remember.

[00:57:50] It was 20-degree glide slope at 300.

[00:57:52] You probably do some math, but it was...

[00:57:54] I can't imagine.

[00:57:55] We never really looked at the vertical velocity.

[00:57:57] We were like looking at airspeed, 300 knots, speed brake, modulating that.

[00:58:04] And then anyway, you're aiming at this Pappy light to keep your 20-degree glide slope.

[00:58:09] When you get 3,000 feet, we start a pre-flare and we transition to a three-degree glide slope because you know, obviously, you want to make a smooth landing.

[00:58:19] We put the gear down at 300 feet above the ground.

[00:58:22] And this gear adds drag and we put it down at the last possible minute and land normally 195 knots.

[00:58:32] If you're heavy, you land up to 205, 2,500 feet down the runway.

[00:58:38] And we all compete on the landings.

[00:58:40] You want on the center line.

[00:58:42] Of course.

[00:58:42] And you want to be as close to your speed as possible.

[00:58:45] And then the other thing is your descent rate.

[00:58:48] We actually look at our descent rate at touchdown, which should be one foot per second or less because you want to grease it on in a nice, smooth touchdown.

[00:58:58] And of course, the landings are on usually national TV.

[00:59:02] So when I came in as the first woman to land the shuttle, I'm like, I better not mess this up.

[00:59:07] Because I've been winning across the country.

[00:59:09] I'm like, I will do it for us.

[00:59:11] And of course, they put a lot of pressure on me.

[00:59:13] But my first landing was at night.

[00:59:15] And fortunately, it went okay.

[00:59:17] That's fantastic.

[00:59:19] Too good.

[00:59:20] Well, Colonel Collins, thank you so much for your time today.

[00:59:23] Can you tell us about the book that you wrote and the incredible documentary that's forthcoming?

[00:59:27] There's my book.

[00:59:28] I actually brought it.

[00:59:29] I wrote the book during the pandemic because, you know, I'm normally pretty busy and I travel and I had like nothing to do.

[00:59:36] And so my co-author, Jonathan Ward, had been asking me to write the book with him.

[00:59:43] And so we did it in the one year of the pandemic.

[00:59:46] And we published it with Skyhorse.

[00:59:50] You can buy it out there.

[00:59:51] I wrote the book so young people can read it.

[00:59:54] There's nothing bad in it.

[00:59:55] I mean, it's all like flying and cool stuff that I did on my flights.

[01:00:00] And I couldn't fit it all in there.

[01:00:02] But we put the highlights in.

[01:00:04] And now there's a filmmaker named Keith Haviland who, like, read the book right after it came out.

[01:00:10] And he's like, I want to do documentary on it.

[01:00:12] So we hemmed it hard and finally said yes.

[01:00:15] And the documentary is done.

[01:00:17] And they are marketing it now to, they just finished it.

[01:00:21] And they're marketing it to film festivals.

[01:00:24] I'm not at liberty to say a film festival picked it up.

[01:00:28] They asked me, don't say anything yet because we haven't announced.

[01:00:31] So I can't say which one it's going to.

[01:00:33] But after the film festival, we'll try to market it to the some of the platforms, you know, like History Channel, Netflix, you know, places like that.

[01:00:42] Where documentaries normally would go.

[01:00:45] So the book is called, yes, I can.

[01:00:47] But the book is called Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars.

[01:00:50] But it's for men.

[01:00:51] It's not just for women.

[01:00:52] And the documentary is called Space Woman.

[01:00:56] And they named it.

[01:00:57] So, but no one else had that name, Space Woman.

[01:01:00] So we got the first Space Woman movie.

[01:01:03] You'll start looking for it next year.

[01:01:04] In early 2025, you should be able to find it somewhere.

[01:01:07] We'll start looking for it.

[01:01:09] Absolutely.

[01:01:10] Well, if you Google the book, go buy the book.

[01:01:13] Check out the documentary.

[01:01:15] Colonel Collins, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today.

[01:01:17] This has been something I've been looking forward to for months.

[01:01:20] And I really appreciate your time.

[01:01:22] Yeah, thanks.

[01:01:22] It was great.

[01:01:23] And thanks to your audience, too.

[01:01:25] Thanks.

[01:01:26] We'll see you on the next one.