First Female Shuttle Pilot Begins Mission

The space shuttle Discovery blasted into orbit Thursday night with a woman in the pilot’s seat for the first time in NASA history.

The spacecraft lit up the sky for miles around as it soared from its pad at 9:22 p.m. PST on twin pillars of fire from its booster rockets.

In another first, Discovery is to rendezvous with Mir, the Russian space station, rehearsing for an upcoming docking later this year as part of an ambitious series of flights that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans with Russia.

Lt. Col. Eileen M. Collins, second in command aboard the shuttle, will control the spacecraft during some operations of the eight-day mission.

“I have not really sat back and thought about how does the first woman pilot fit into all this because maybe that might be way too distracting for me right now,” Collins said at a news conference before liftoff. “I’ll think about it after the flight a little bit more.”

Another notable in the Discovery crew is former Mir resident Vladimir Titov. He is the second Russian cosmonaut to fly aboard a U.S. space shuttle.

The shuttle thundered away from the Kennedy Space Center during a brief five-minute launch window. The time frame was short because the shuttle has to fly into a high-inclination orbit to reach Mir.

Commander James Wetherbee will steer Discovery within 35 feet of the space station some 200 miles above Earth. The shuttle will hover there briefly and then back away and fly around Mir, allowing the astronauts to photograph the station. Discovery’s other crew members are Dr. Bernard Harris Jr., Michael Foale and Janice Voss.

The last time U.S. and Russian spacecraft met in orbit was in 1975 when the Apollo and Soyuz ships docked.

In addition to the Mir rendezvous, which is scheduled for Monday, the Discovery crew will deploy and retrieve a free-flying astronomy satellite built by the Navy. The device measures the far-ultraviolet region of the light spectrum.

The flight also will include a spacewalk to test a spacesuit with improved insulation, developed after astronauts complained of getting cold hands during earlier spacewalks. Discovery is also carrying the Spacehab module, which contains a variety of public- and private-sector experiments.

Collins will be responsible for firing thruster rockets and monitoring various flight gauges during the mission. She was selected as an astronaut in 1990 and hopes to break another barrier by becoming the commander of a future shuttle flight.

Collins, 38, began taking flying lessons as a teen-ager in Elmira, N.Y., and graduated from Air Force pilot training in 1979. She taught math at the Air Force Academy and was a flight instructor between 1986 and 1989.