T minus 10 seconds. Go from 8 engine
start.
7, 6,
5. 3 engines up and burning.
3, 2,
1.
And liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery,
beginning America's new journey to the moon, Mars,
and beyond. And the vehicle has cleared the
tower.
Houston's now controlling. Commander Ollie Collins confirming Discovery's
rolling onto a course for Vonovu at the
International Space Station.
Hello, and welcome to the Physics World Stories
podcast. I'm Andrew Gleston, and I'm delighted to
say that in today's episode, we'll be bringing
you astronaut
Eileen Collins, who didn't just break barriers as
the first woman to pilot and then command
a NASA space shuttle, she was also the
person who NASA chose to lead one of
its most significant missions,
the return to flight mission aboard discovery
after the tragic Columbia disaster.
Eileen's journey
of resilience, courage, and dedication
is now captured in a powerful new film,
Space Woman,
by director Hannah Berry.
It's previously directed
Miss World 1970,
Beauty Queens and Bedlam, Rockfield, the studio on
the farm, and Banned, the Mary White house
story. We'll hear from Eileen soon. But first,
I wanted to know what had drawn Hannah
Berryman to this story.
I was approached by
the producers,
and I guess I'd done previous documentaries about
strong women that are important, I guess, in
in in sort of cultural or social history
as well.
And they
said to me, was I interested? I said,
yes. I I was
intrigued straight away and then I read Eileen's
book
and the story immediately drew me in and
it was kind of a mixture of being
the first woman to do these things that
were very much a kind of male domain
like the top gunners have been a pilot
first and then into space and I think
via her story it was so personal it
took me into space and I felt like
I was going and I thought maybe we
could do that with the viewer
and I also was intrigued
that she wasn't from a rich and privileged
background that was just as much as an
important thing for me
and,
and I was into and I was suddenly
interested in space. I wasn't not interested in
space before but it made me more interested
so
I wanted to do the film and meet
Eileen.
Yeah. Fair enough. Did you go I mean,
how did you go about it? Did you
read the whole book and then set out
about which interviews you wanted to do? And
well, I read the whole book, and then
we had a quick Zoom, didn't we, Eileen?
We chatted and,
chatted to
Pat and chatted to Bridget, Eileen and Pat's
daughter.
And then we made a plan to go
and visit
Eileen, her sister in her hometown in New
York state,
and that's where we did the first interview.
It was a kind of quite casual interview,
the 2 shot interview,
And that was great to do. We filmed
a little bit there and in the place
where Eileen first saw people flying, gliding, which
was because I'll mark in New York is
a gliding center because of the weather and
the conditions, which is kind of amazing. We
were lucky because we only just got the
conditions to film it. It was horrible weather
when we were there.
And then when we did the main interview,
I mean, I normally do interviews that are
kind of 2 to 3 hours long max,
but we did this. It was about 8
hours.
An hour of that was lunch. And Eileen
was
just as competent right at the end as
she was at the start.
Amazing. Amazing. And that was you know, that's
how we did it. And then we just
filled it out with dip different filming with
different people that were part of the story
and, you know, with the family and things.
So, yeah, it worked like that.
It's a silly question, but are you happy
with the way it's turned out? Very. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Because it's an emotional
story as well, and that's, I guess, something
that my films are supposed to be. They're
kind of wrestling with
all the things that make us the people
we are
and all the ways that affects our life
and, you know,
so
it was a it was really interesting. And
and the fact that Eileen was part of
such a dramatic
return to flight, you know, that was obviously
the culmination of an amazing career.
And I I was really happy with how
that all came out.
Eileen, was this an easy thing to say
yes to?
No. It wasn't easy. Well, this back up
before I got to know Hannah,
right when the book came out, which was
October of 2021,
shortly after that,
Keith Haviland,
who happens to know my coauthor from
I mean, they're
not close, but they,
I would say, are acquaintances because
my coauthor,
his name is Jonathan Ward.
He's written 2 previous books on actually, he's
written 3 previous books on the space program.
And he's met Keith in the past. Well,
Keith contacted him and said he'd like to
do a documentary
on the book. And so Jonathan
Ward
relayed that to me, and I said absolutely
not.
I'm not doing no. I don't have time.
I don't want I'm a private person. I
don't want my life out there. It was
hard enough for me to write this book.
And by the way, my last flight was
in 2,005.
So I waited 15 years to decide to
write a book.
So, you know, I just didn't I I
don't like to,
promote myself. And I figured I'm just good.
Well, the pandemic hit in 2020. And I
had nothing to do because all my speak
I'm a speaker and I'm a professional speaker.
They all either canceled or went to Zoom.
So I had all this extra time on
my hands. So I wrote the book.
Right when it was published, Keith Haviland. I
just told you that story there.
And I said to Jonathan, no.
The book was was a step that
I relented to. Now I don't wanna do
no. I'm not doing the anyway, like, a
year went by.
And Keith,
I would say we had we either talked
on the phone or we had Zoom. I
don't remember which one. But we
communicated, Keith Haviland and I. And I've and
I said yes. And I think the reason
I said yes was not about me.
It was about
the message, the story.
I really think it's important for young people
part of the reason I'm a speaker,
for young people to have role models.
In in this world that we live in,
the culture has gone very,
crazy.
And I think it's good to for young
women actually, for young men also to have
role models
that are
in the math in STEM, math, science, technology,
engineering.
Somebody who's been in the military. Somebody who's
in the space program.
Somebody who, like Hannah mentioned,
you know, wasn't handed to me. I
went into this career field flying because I
love to fly. I just it's in my
blood.
And I thought there's probably a young person
out there somewhere even if we only reach
1 person or a dozen people or I
think we're gonna reach a lot of people.
I think the message will help young people.
And I'm talking like middle school, high school,
college
in that. And so that's why I eventually
said yes. But once I say yes to
something, I'm in it a 100%.
And I really
as much of my I I tried to,
like, give get everybody's request done as best
as I could. So I
put a 100% into it. Course, the pandemic
was over, and I started
my traveling and speaking again. So that made
it difficult to get everything done. So can
I take you back to when you were
in high school? We I know that you,
you know, you became a a test flight
pilot and obviously went to space,
for some time. But it when high school
was space
the destination for you? Yes.
It's it's since 4th grade. In 4th grade,
I read a story about the Gemini astronauts
in a magazine about the Scholastic
Magazine.
That had a huge impact on me. I
still remember it all these years later.
I was looking at the
short biographies
of these
Gemini astronauts.
They were
pilots, test pilots,
engineers.
They were doing really they were flying the
fastest airplanes,
and
they were I just wanted to be just
like them. And here I am, a little
girl. There were no women at the time.
But I think I was so young. At
that point, I was so young that I
just thought, I'll be a lady astronaut.
It wasn't until I got a little bit
older than 9 years old that I went,
oh, I wonder
if I wonder if I can be an
astronaut. I mean, that was I don't know
at what point
because there weren't women astronauts until 1978.
But but I still said, I'm gonna be
a lady astronaut. And let me say one
other thing about high school. I did not
take physics my senior year of high school.
Like, I took all the science, which back
then was,
there was, like, material science
and then biology and then chemistry. And I
took those 9, 10, 11th grade. And then
in 12th grade, I did not take physics.
And I remember making a decision
to not take physics, which I regretted
shortly after high school graduation.
I didn't know what physics was. My
high school did not require it. And I
just decided, oh, I'm gonna do what my
friends are doing, and I took some other
courses.
And I regret that. And so when I
talk to young people now, I tell them
take all 4 years of science.
You it will make you smarter. It will
help you be better at solving problems.
Because, you know, the scientific method, you know,
your brain is still developing. And as you
learn the scientific method, it teaches you problem
solving,
not just in science, but in your everyday
life.
And I went and I took physics in
college. And I loved it. And I was
actually for a time, I was a physics
major.
I ended up switching to math that had
to do with the air force requirements. But
my message to young people is to encourage
kids in high school to take all their
science.
Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. Don't worry if you don't
get a a. I tell them, don't worry
about your grades. You just
a lot of them won't take science because
they're afraid they're gonna get a b, and
it's gonna ruin their GPA, or maybe they'll
get a c. Take the science anyway. Forget
about
Ukraine. You wanna you wanna learn.
Yeah. So you don't have to go you
don't have to go to space once you've
done the,
the all the sciences. Right? But but you
did. I wonder whether when you were doing
the flight tests,
of of the different planes you were doing,
there's a there's a moment in the film
and obviously in your life where you're, you
know, you visit the edge of space.
If you'd hadn't been able to go beyond
that, would you have been okay? I mean,
would that have been enough for you, or
did you
definitely need to go up and into orbit?
Well, you know, I talk to people about
space. I divide space into 3 areas. They're
in from a this is from a pilot's
point of view. There's suborbital,
which,
obviously, you don't go around the earth. You
just go up and you come down. That's
what Alan Shepard did in 1961, I believe.
You go up and you come down. The
flight's 15 minutes long.
But, technically, if you go over 50 miles,
some say 62 miles, Karman line. But if
you go over 50 miles,
technically, you're an astronaut.
The second part of space is orbital. That's
where you go around the earth. You really
need to get up to, like, 90 or
a 100 miles
to go to have enough energy to go
around the earth, preferably higher. Like, the space
station is at about 250
miles. You can switch to kilometers,
if you want. And then the third one
is deep space. That's where you pretty much
escape the majority of Earth's gravity, and you
get away. You you're not in orbit anymore.
You go well,
you're not in
I'm gonna say
some scientists might pick that one apart if
I say you're not in orbit anymore. Basically,
the third one is deep space where you
go to the moon or Mars.
So I think the answer to your question
is
if I had a chance to go beyond
orbital flight, which is where the shuttle and
the station was,
200 to 250 miles,
yes.
I would love to go to the moon.
220,000
miles, the moon.
3 days to get there.
I consider that deep space from
an operational point of view.
And I would love to go to Mars.
But Mars is 6 months to 2 years
away,
depending on
different factors.
But it was really the timing. You know,
when I was born and what options were
available.
I'd go there today if I could. You
know, I would now that my kids are
grown up and they are
I loved being a mom. So, you know,
I was able to do the astronaut mom
thing as a as a shuttle astronaut.
And,
you know, when you go into deep space,
you're gonna be gone. Mars is gonna be,
it's gonna be 2 years minimum.
And, we are so different.
I don't think I'd leave my kids for
2 years. I really don't. I mean, other
people, if you got you know, if it's
a woman, she's got her husband, take care
of her kids, that'd be fine. It's each
person's individual choice. But I think,
yes, I would.
I don't think I'm too old either.
Well, why why would you want to go?
What what is about Mars do you want
to go for?
I like to explore. I'm just an explorer
person, and I was all the way back
to when I was a kid. I remember
back in the back in the 19 sixties
when I was a little kid,
my mother let my sister and I wander
around the neighborhood
with no
supervision,
but it was a different world back then.
And I remember my sister who's a year
younger than me, we would walk around the
neighborhood. We go into people's backyards. We cut
through you know, climb over fences.
When I was a little bit older,
we moved to we were living in
government subsidized housing, which is like these buildings.
A lot of people
in the buildings, but it was on the
edge of a forest. And we went back
in the forest and with me and my
friends, and we were all we were in
the creeks and climbing trees and
pretending that we were
having forts and, you know, fighting bears.
And for some reason that
I I loved that when I was a
kid. So I consider myself kind of an
explorer. And I think some people have that
in their blood. They just want to explore.
And I think some people like being at
home
and but and that's okay. I just think
that the good thing for the human race
is that we have people that like to
do different things. Definitely.
I think that's why I want you to
end the film today as well, Eileen. That's
why we sort of did that bit where
we talk it broadens out at the end
and why we ended it in that way
because
it's actually about that in the end. You
know? Exploring.
And I agree with Eileen. It's like, thank
god that there's so many different people.
It's up to everyone to to pursue what
you know, the part of humanity that they
are, and I and I I think that's
amazing.
I I love reading about the explorers from
the 1500
1600,
how they
I mean, that took guts to do with
they traveling around the world. And,
you know, even back, you know,
in the Greece, BC's, I talk about that
in my speeches where
the explorers of ancient times went out in
the
what we know out in the Mediterranean Sea.
I mean they didn't know if they were
gonna
run into sea monsters or
you know an enemy they were gonna have
to fight. Maybe they'd fall off the edge
of the earth. But they had the
the
bravery to go and explore. And I think
that's something in the human
race,
us species probably better. Something about us is
humans
that there's
people that want to go out and
learn new things
and see what's out there and understand it.
We're doing that today. As physicists, you know,
we're doing that today with instruments,
which I also
like to talk to young people about that.
No. It's a lovely thing, isn't it? I
I'm I'm wondering about the settling there though
because of the exploration.
Do you feel like we should settle on
Mars just should humanity move there in in
some form?
Yes. Definitely.
I think that's an easy argument to make.
We can see that the earth is
limited size, limited resources,
population is growing.
And we need to,
as Elon Musk says, I'm going to credit
him you know, become a multi planet species.
We don't have the ability to travel
that
far and that fast right now.
But I believe that
just as
the airplane was invented,
You can go as far back as
the wheel was invented,
the boat,
the airplane, cars.
Someday
so right now, space travel is chemical propulsion.
I believe that someday someone will discover or
invent
a way to travel that is much faster
than what we have today.
And when we find another planet
like Earth
that we haven't really we haven't really found
yet, but I believe that
we will someday.
We will find a way to travel there.
But we're just the steps we're taking now
are very, very baby steps. And I don't
think I'll be alive to see travel to
another planet like earth, obviously. I think we're
going very far in the future.
But
I really believe that we will find
something out there like earth that we could
live on.
Hannah, would if if you're not the explorer,
would you settle? I am the explorer just
not the place.
Okay. Fair enough. I like exploring people's lives.
Of course. Would you move to another planet?
If that if that option was there, would
you take that
plan? No. No. Why not? I don't know.
I've got a strange view of it all.
As a sort of person who doesn't know
anything about whether we could settle somewhere else,
I feel like I don't even
if this doesn't sound too weird, I don't
mind if humans are a blip in time
either
and if we're just gone, because that's what
happens, I don't want that to happen. But
if it does,
so be it. I don't know. I was
always interested in physics when I was a
kid and then I stopped being, you know,
I went into humanities instead, but I always
find it really frustrating that I couldn't
you know, the the idea of infinite and
where well, you can put your hands in
it and where's an edge. And if there's
no edge, how does that even I couldn't
envisage it, and it got so annoying. I
didn't even want to think about it anymore.
And maybe
it's beyond the realms of my comprehension that
that could happen. So I just
I just can't imagine it. No.
That's Eileen, when you're in space and you're
looking out of the the shuttle window, are
are you do you spend most of your
time looking down at Earth, or do you
look out to the stars as well? I
would say 99.9
looking down at Earth.
I have looked out at the stars. But
from where we are in low Earth orbit,
the stars look very similar to
the way they look from the surface of
the Earth.
With the exception, there's no atmosphere in space.
So the stars don't twinkle. You know, sometimes
on Earth, when you have a lot of
humidity or clouds, you might see
stars twinkle.
You don't see that from space. They're very
solid
dots.
But the earth is so compelling,
so beautiful, so bright. Because you look at
space it's all dark. And you look at
the earth and the sun is shining on
deserts and clouds very, very bright.
And then the ocean the blue ocean sort
of medium. And then the times when you
see land,
it's it's not desert. Let's say a
jungle. It's very kind of a subdued green
color.
But
it's
just beautiful watching the earth turn below you.
And
when I like to play the little game,
like, I look out the window, what is
that?
What am I looking at? What continent or,
you know, what portion of a continent am
I looking at? And then I try to
pick out cities. At night, it's a lot
easier because cities are so bright.
But it's fascinating to think about the people
down there.
And I would think about
the billions of people on earth. Every person
has problems,
and every person has
happiness and sadness.
And I think about all the energy
in the people on earth.
I mean, it's it's just mind blowing.
And I'll see cities that are very historic
like Jerusalem,
very historic city, and what's going on down
there. And when I look at Europe, I
think about all the history that took place
in Europe
and
how people move around the planet, how people
migrate. And, you know, what happened over the
course of history,
it really has made me
very
interested in traveling and reading history.
I was never a history buff until after
I retired from the astronaut program, and I
said, I wanna read about these places that
I saw from space. Yeah. That's cool. And
now I just I read history books all
the time. Oh, that's really cool. Now when
I was a kid, I used to read
science fiction.
I read Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clark, and
I just loved science sci fi. I was
a sci fi nut. I don't read sci
fi anymore. I read history.
When I was young, I read about the
future. And now that I'm old, I read
about the past.
That's what I tell people now because I
encourage people to read books. Put your phone
down. It's making I tell people kids. I
tell them your phone's making you stupid
and books will make you smart. I have
to read books.
Very
very good for you.
I did because you were commander of the
space shuttle. Right? Which is just extraordinary.
Yeah. How much time off do you get
as a commander when you're on mission? On
the space shuttle, we really,
didn't really have any time off because
is for me as commander, I'm constantly responsible
for the safety of my crew and responsible
that the mission everything is mission, mission, mission.
We gotta get the mission done. And then
you've got, of course, the umbrella of we
need to do it safely.
And I've always been concerned with my crew.
Are they
feeling healthy? How have they adapted to zero
gravity?
I would ask my crew every day, how
are you doing?
If you need help with something,
we can rearrange the schedule up here. Because
people tend to get behind because problems things
break and problems happen up there, and we
have to jiggle things around.
So I never really had any time off.
Now technically, on the schedule, everyone is scheduled
8 hours. It's back in the shuttle days.
Everyone has 8 hours of sleep, but very
few people took 8 hours because
we would normally have
2 hours of like, you'd wake up. It
was supposed to be 3 hours, but it
was never 3 hours. You'd wake up. You
would have 2 hours of what's called post
sleep. And that's when you eat, brush your
teeth, get your clothes ready, read your email,
and then you'd work all day. You get
an hour off for lunch, 30 minutes maybe.
And then before you go to bed, you'd
have pre sleep 2 hours. Well, everybody worked
right into their pre sleep because something broke
or you're helping one of your crew members.
And then you'd end up going to sleep
late.
So I don't know if we ever really
had any time off. Now in the shuttle
days, if your flight was only 12 days
or 15 days, you could barrel through that.
Today on the space station, they're up there
for 6 months or a year. So today's
astronauts on the station
do get more time off. My first flight,
I don't think I looked out the window
very much at all because I was adapting
to space and trying to catch up.
And it was February, and it was cloudy.
And it was just a kind of a
bad,
ground track over the Earth. But my second
flight was in May, and it was gorgeous.
And I was at the window a lot
more.
So it it kind of varies. That's the
commanding side of it is, you know, you
you're on completely
all the time. As a pilot, is it
the same I I feel like when you're
taking off, there's not much you can do
as a pilot. Am I wrong on that?
So,
yeah, in today's
Dragon capsule,
it's fully automated. They don't they don't fly.
And they don't really
honestly,
they may need to come up with a
better name than pilot because you're not really
piloting
in today's capsules like the Starliner or the
Dragon or even the Russian Soyuz.
Although I will say
scratch the Soyuz because they do have some
piloting skills for rendezvous.
Now, on the space shuttle, we actually flew
the space shuttle during rendezvous. We hand flew
it. And we had 6 degrees of freedom
with our thrust hand controller and our rotational
hand controller. We flew the rendezvous. We also
flew the landing. Every shuttle landing
was landed by hand manually by the commander.
Nowadays, they splash down and there's no
landing.
So
the other thing in the shuttle days is
many of the tasks that we had to
do were also manual. For example,
after main engine cutoff,
we had to tie 2 main buses together.
That was done by the pilot with switches.
We had to vent and purge the main
propulsion system.
We had to manually operate heaters for the
cryogenics
and manage fuel cells.
And that was done manually.
Today, it's the computers do the whole thing.
And that's that's good because it frees up
more time for the astronauts to do science
experiments.
And we have the technology today to do
that. And all those things we learned through
the shuttle program, we learned what needed to
be automated and how it needed to be
done. And so today's spacecraft are benefiting from
what we did in the shuttle days.
I hope that answers your
your question. And that's not to be I'm
not criticizing
today's space. It's
it's the way it should be.
Yeah. But there's there's still the need for
somebody to be able to pilot a craft
like as I'm thinking of,
Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. He needed
to take control. You needed to take control
to
flip. Can you tell us about that flipping
the the shuttle route? The RPM, the rendezvous,
pitcheron maneuver,
it was done first time on,
STS 114
in 2005.
That was my last flight. It was the
flight after the Columbia accident.
The accident happened in 2003.
My crew was the first to go up
after the accident. And,
It was suggested by the rendezvous
engineers
that we do the splipper on maneuver,
which is basically turn the shuttle upside down
so the crew above us on the space
station could photograph our heat shield to see
if there was damage.
And we developed that procedure,
the astronaut office,
with the rendezvous engineers.
My crew practiced it in the simulator.
And we
tweaked it. And
we ended up being the 1st crew to
fly that. We were when we actually flew
it, we were 600 feet below. Like, you
come up from below. Right? So we stopped
at 600 feet below the space station.
We're standing by for the beginning of this
rendezvous pitch maneuver. It's due to begin at
12:15
PM CST.
Just a few minutes from now,
you can see the, shadow of the
spacecraft beginning to, creep up there on Discovery's
right wing. Basically, we were flipping around the,
y axis.
And the whole thing took about 6 minutes.
And
the 2, well, the astronaut, the cosmonaut on
the space station photographed us.
And then we
continued on with our rendezvous
and came in and docked.
So again, the purpose of it was to
photograph
the,
the tiles and the leading edge of the
shuttle wing underneath.
Because Columbia, I won't go into the Columbia
accident now, but that's where they had damage
and there was no way to see that
damage on the Columbia flight.
So on my flight on discovery 2 years
later, we didn't want that to happen again.
So we developed that RPM.
How do you know how to do that?
I mean, it's a slightly silly question.
No. We have a simulator.
So we we have a simulator.
So first of all, we have analysis. So
you the engineers do their analysis and they're
like, well, we have, you know, this much,
momentum. This is what they know what orbital
mechanics are doing. They know,
they're solid equations and,
basically data from the past. So we understand
orbital mechanics. So they would do their analysis.
Can this be done? The answer was yes.
So then we wrote procedures for it. And
we went in the simulator and practiced it.
And we saw where the tough areas were,
where the problem areas were.
And we would develop workarounds for that
based on what the capability of the shuttle
was.
So although
we hand I flew hand fluid as the
commander with this the whole crew worked on
this. Everyone had their like my pilot was
reading the checklist, keeping everybody on schedule. We
had somebody
working the laptop, computer, the lasers,
cameras. And so we all worked together as
a crew.
But a portion of it was flown on
autopilot.
So, for example, if this is the station,
we come up from below. We stop at
600 feet. So I hand flew all that.
Once we were in position, I hit the
autopilot.
And the whole 6 minute maneuver was flown
with the autopilot on. So we all went
to the restroom
because it was so long. And then you
come back up at the end of the
6 minutes.
I took manual control back
and I flew
the what we call a transition to the
v bar, which is the velocity vector.
And then we'd be at about 400 feet
and then you'd come in. We would fly
our normal hop down the v bar
and we eventually
gradually break and slow down. And we docked
at 0.2 feet per second.
So the docking and by the way, everything
was in English units back in the shuttle
days. And now they're using metric units on
the space station. But we did everything
in English units in shuttle. How different does
it feel piloting the shuttle in space as
opposed
to the simulator? Is it very close?
It's very close. It's very close. It yes.
We can tweak the simulator. So the astronauts
would come back from the early flights and
say,
it didn't actually behave like that. Maybe change
the gains a little bit. Maybe change the
timing in these
so I would say
it was it was
better than 95%
accurately simulated
on the ground. So there were no surprises
flying the rendezvous. It's a little bit different
on the landing.
So we have a separate simulator,
a Gulfstream 2 airplane that we use to
simulate
the shuttle landings.
There were little,
I would say, there were some
differences there depending on your weight and center
of gravity. And I don't want to get
too technical there. But
I think
being a test pilot,
I had to make some,
I want to say things that I had
learned from being a test pilot.
Real time corrections
making the transition from the simulator
to the actual
shuttle landing.
Without going into
a lot of technical
mumbo jumbo,
I think there was a lot of feel.
And I used to tell other
potential,
upcoming shuttle commanders that were going to land,
be careful using your feel.
You can do that in an airplane. You
can feel your way through a landing based
on what you've landed in the past. The
problem coming back from space is your body
has changed.
We've been up in zero gravity. Your face
has been full of
fluids, and you've kind of adjusted to being
in space. And as you come back to
earth and you get this gravity field,
all the fluids are pulled back down. You're
sitting down. Obviously, you have a g suit
on. The g suit helps keep those fluids
from pooling in your legs.
But you're still you're you're still are losing
some fluids up here. So
you have to use your eyes to land.
And I have always been very,
I want to say, focusing on using my
eyes and
not using my
traditional pilot feel.
And using my eyes, meaning the heads up
display,
the PAPI lights, which are precision approach indicator
lights, the ball bar, which helps us stay
on glide slope, and all of these landing
aids,
you have to be very
visual and very procedural,
and you can't really feel your way through
the landing like you can in a airplane.
Houston discovery.
Wheel stop.
Roger, wheel stop. Discovery, and congratulations
on a truly spectacular test flight.
Stevie Ray, Suicci,
Andy, Vegas, Charlie, Wendy,
and Eileen,
welcome home, friends.
And thank you. Those are great words to
hear. We're happy to be back, and we
congratulate the whole team for a job well
done. We're going to page 5 dash 3.
And we'll meet you there.
An an experience that very few people have.
But what what what are the main or
the main lesson that you would like to
give to us here on Earth that you
learned in space? Reading books about science fiction
is very important, I think, because it tells
us what can be.
What what can the future
possibilities be?
Read books. I'm reading a book now on
artificial intelligence
and and, which is more near term than
what I'm reading. But I've also read far
term
artificial intelligence who read different authors
and don't ever think something can't be done.
Maybe it can't be done in our lifetime,
but they but y'all need to be like
setting the scenes for what can happen in
the future. Brilliant.
Hannah, what's your one lesson that you won't
be able to take away from the film?
However complicated it is,
human endeavor is something to be applauded,
and it's amazing.
And,
you know, it's inspiring,
and it's tricky, and it should be. And
that's that's part of what we like as,
you know, as humans. We we want to
do things that aren't straightforward, and so it's
great to see Eileen do that. And,
you know,
I hope people learn a lot from watching
how that happened.
And see our film. See our film. You
will really love to see how someone like
Hannah who has who the creative mind and
me who's a more procedural mind,
how it came together
in in the film. I do recommend that
you see spacewoman directed by Hannah Berryman, which
does tell the story from
the humble beginnings of Eileen Collins to commanding
and piloting the space shuttle. It was incredibly
exciting. Right? You know, finally, we're seeing a
woman in the cockpit.
Come on. Come on. Come on.
There probably were some men in the astronaut
office who would have preferred not being on
those flights.
The whole idea of having a woman with
the controls
was, at the time, hard for some at
NASA to digest.
It's a mixture of archival footage and
beautifully shot new footage
along with some really insightful interviews
that tell the story not just of what
happened to Eileen in space, but some of
the dramas back here on earth, both in
the space program and
among her family. At the time of recording
this podcast,
the discussions about the distribution of the film
are ongoing. But if you can't get to
the world premiere this November at the New
York documentary festival,
doc NYC.
Then keep an eye on spacewoman.film
where you'll find all the latest information and
the links to social media for the film.
I'd like to thank Eileen Collins and Hannah
Behrman for talking to me. We'll be back
next month with something else from this wonderful
world of physics. I know some of you
may have been expecting something about Pele's tears.
We will bring you that in a future
episode. But for now, I'll leave you with
a short audio clip from the documentary,
Space Woman. The launch is gonna go shortly
after midnight.
I didn't eat anything because I thought
I might get sick.
The first eight and a half minutes, 90%
of your trolley goes out to me. That's
true.
Probably not on this one. On this one.
Maybe just a lower chest.
Looking at the shuttle at night,
it's just overwhelming
brilliant light.
It's one of the most incredible things that
I've ever seen.
And I'm thinking, I'm gonna launch on that
thing. Okay.
Watching the clock count down,
that's when your heart starts
beating.
Discovery crew OPC closing lock advisors and the
802 flow. Have a good flight.
And thank you very much for listening.