Collins becomes first woman to command a shuttle; Columbia loses an engine on the way up
Thirty years to the day after Apollo 11 touched down, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins stood at Kennedy Space Center to watch a different kind of first. On July 23, 1999, Lt. Col. Eileen Collins commanded Space Shuttle Columbia into orbit, the first woman to hold that role on a U.S. spaceflight. Minutes into ascent, a loose pin struck an engine nozzle and ruptured three coolant tubes, cutting one engine out early and leaving Columbia seven miles short of its planned orbit. The crew pressed on anyway, deploying the roughly 50,000-pound Chandra X-ray Observatory later that day.
NASA first admitted women into the astronaut corps in 1978. Collins's command in 1999 finally answered who among them would fly first. John Young had told her as much years earlier, when she was selected as a pilot: "You will be the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle." Chandra, meanwhile, gave American astronomers their sharpest X-ray eyes on the universe, an instrument still shaping U.S. astrophysics decades later.
QWho else was watching from Kennedy Space Center that morning?
The launch fell on the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and NASA had a full house for it. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 crew, were on hand at Kennedy Space Center, along with Hillary Clinton and the United States women's national soccer team. The Apollo astronauts marked thirty years since their own landing while Collins opened a new chapter in the same program.
QWhat did the crew do with the shuttle's cameras after the main objective was done?
Once Chandra was safely away, the five astronauts turned a portable instrument called the Southwest Ultraviolet Imaging System on the sky. Over the rest of the four-day, twenty-two-hour flight they used it to capture ultraviolet images of Earth, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter, a bonus survey of the solar system squeezed in around a mission built to deliver one very heavy telescope.
QDid the engine trouble ever get a musical tribute?
Guitarist Eric Johnson later wrote an instrumental called 'Columbia,' though not for STS-93 itself. He composed it after the orbiter's loss in 2003. He said he wanted the piece to work as 'a salute, a celebration' of the astronauts' lives rather than dwell on the tragedy, Guitarist Eric Johnson later wrote an instrumental called 'Columbia,' though not for STS-93 itself; he composed it after the orbiter's loss in 2003, saying he wanted the piece to work as 'a salute, a celebration' of the astronauts' lives rather than dwell on the tragedy.
