Eileen Collins: [inaudible] the simulator ... back here are for ... training.

Eileen Collins: So we get a more of an engineering environment ... go out there. But since we’ll be the [private] crew, we’re going to ... but we’ll be out there.

Interviewer: So do all astronauts go once a year or just once ...

Eileen Collins: Twice a year. All pilots go twice a year.

Interviewer: [inaudible]

Eileen Collins: Excuse me. We’re out there back in August I think, we’ll be back again in February.

Interviewer: Okay.

Eileen Collins: ... it’s kind of fun for us too, because it gives us time to get together with the crew, spend some time together and we fly out and we do the spins and ... have a good time.

Interviewer: Uh huh.

Eileen Collins: So, it’s supposed to be a chance to get rested ... So yeah, we’ll be out there ... if you needed to talk to me again, then

Eileen Collins: ... if you there and you’re on base and we could cover something, fine. If you could let us know when you’re out there and if there is a time. [inaudible]

Interviewer: Are you going to take a picture here today ... digital pictures....

Camera Person: Yeah.

Interviewer: Okay.

Camera Person: We’re going to take some digitized ones and then some other really better quality ones....

Eileen Collins: Do you want to take pictures here in the seat or do you want me...

Interviewer: That would be great. Yeah, maybe

[talkover]

Camera Person: We want to just get where you are.

Interviewer: [inaudible]

Eileen Collins: ... we’re going to ... talking about what’s in here first.

Interviewer: Okay.

Eileen Collins: Okay.

Interviewer: And then take your photo.

Eileen Collins: Okay.

Interviewer: Okay.

Eileen Collins: Sounds good.

Interviewer: Well let’s see you’re in the commander’s seat. And at one point you were in the pilot’s seat?

Eileen Collins: Right, pilot’s seat. I’ve flown twice as a pilot.

Interviewer: Okay. Tell us a little bit what’s the difference besides being a pilot and what you do now as a commander, actually from a control standpoint.

Eileen Collins: Oh ... well actually the flying, the stick and the instruments are the same on both sides. The only difference is ...This is called a throttle or a speed brake. And on launch the throttle, and only the pilot has the throttle with the engines. And on landing both of these function as speed brakes. There's a little bit of difference there. These three CRT display ... system and the trajectory .....

Eileen Collins: The main difference is the pilot, the side panel right there, the top ... revolving ... the bottom panel is the auxiliary power units and the hydraulics and the back panel has some ... main engine ...

Interviewer: Okay.

Eileen Collins: On the commander side, this panel is the environmental ... and same thing down here. This is your actually your environmental ...on the lower panel, and I have circuit breakers back here for a lot of the pumps... in the ...pumps and fans and things like that.

Eileen Collins: The commander also has the five computers - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - the five onboard computers and you’ve got a power switch, a ... switch and a mode switch. And these are some of the what you call, MDMs which are the ... computers and the end devices like back end —I don’t want to be too technical here - radar altimeters and inertial measurement units and star trackers, and these are the boxes that kind of translate the computer commands...

Interviewer: Okay.

Eileen Collins: And that’s it kind of in a nutshell.

Interviewer: Are you ... You still are kind of pilot at some point?

Eileen Collins: Oh yes. The commander actually makes all the landings. The only ... a shuttle pilot has never actually landed in orbit. All landings are made with the commander in the left seat, but the pilot is trained ... brakes ...The whole concept of the shuttle is you’ve got 2, 3, 5 of everything ...

Interviewer: Okay. And the commander is the pilot first?

Eileen Collins: Yes, except for the very first flight.

Interviewer: Okay.

Eileen Collins: We obviously have had some people come straight into the left seat, but nowadays the typical flow is that the pilot will fly twice as the pilot before he or she moves to the seat, and occasionally, the pilot flies frequently before moving to the command. It all depends on the need, where our people are, who we need to fly and ...the mission.

Interviewer: And how is control ......physically here, and which control? [Inaudible].

Eileen Collins: Well, mission control has the capability to uplink certain things. .... For example, on exit or entry they can uplink commands to change the communications system ..or the flow of the communications system, but for the most part.....most of the trajectory and the main engine throttling is all done by computer control. The software's been loaded and it's all done by computer control, but the crew has the ability on everything to intervene manually. You can fly manually or manually throttle the engine or change the push position if there's some kind of a malfunction.

Ground has the capability to do some of it, but there's also a delay in that the ground has about a seven to eight second delay in looking into telemetry, and then there's another seven to eight second delay in the command to the orbiter, and .... actually, depending on the orbit - Actually depending on what they're doing, several times the ground will uplink......caution and warning..... pretty common things you see...... what temperature will the caution warning go off, or what pressure will the caution warning go off. Those things can be changed on board or on the ground. There’s kind of a system that's been developed — what the ground normally does and what the crew normally does. For the most part, it's important for the crew to be in control because you need to be capable of making the technical decisions…….. Normally that it all done manually and then we will report to the ground what we've done and where we're going ......It works out pretty good, and I think it's important that we talk to Mission Control about what we're doing.......

Interviewer: Have you ever had a situation where there were problems. Where you had to take immediate action?

Eileen Collins: Not on any of my flights. But, of course, when you train, you do malfunction procedures. Every day when you train in your simulator, you do numerous malfunctions where you have to intervene. For example, an engine failed. You need to complete the shut-down procedure inside. You need to do an abort. You have a switch here that will return to launch site or to orbit or..... landing. We've been through the software…. We can change the throttle setting through software. There's all kinds of interactions. For the most part.... malfunctioning....and through the CRT, we can go back and forth, we can type in different commands to observe different systems and make sure everything is healthy.

If you happen to see a problem, for example, like the hydraulic pressure drop or .... go to high speed, We have procedures that handle those problem to make it as safe as possible to go back into orbit or back to the ground.

Interviewer: ....... what you see right now, and what you do in your office is different. How does that really take place? From flying military planes to flying in a shuttle.

Eileen Collins: There's a lot of ....... to military flying. In my previous job, I was an instructor pilot in a P58, and in the airplane, we ran into a lot of different situations that required constructive decision making, and four-second decisions and that kind of thing. From there I went on to fly [41s]. It’s a cargo aircraft, similar to this where we had an aircraft commander and copilot, we had flight engineers, we had load masters and flight nurses.

Interviewer: A whole crew sort of like you have here.

Eileen Collins: All kinds of folks. In that job I served as co-pilot of the aircraft... ..and I find there's a lot of similarities between that job and the job of being shuttle commander. You have a crew. You need to learn what your crew's jobs are and what their individual talents are and pretty much let them do their job and have them report to you if there's a problem, and you just kind of - You’re expecting people to do their job, and report to you……. I find that the way to prove the crew members interact together here at NASA is very similar to what we did in the military. I may be a good teacher. There’s a lot of teaching to do. They are all doing their jobs right away. ......It's not too bad.....

Interviewer: Okay.

[Talk over].

Camera Person: I'd like to take some snapshot........

Eileen Collins: Anything else you want to do.

Interviewer: I now what I wanted to ask a couple more questions. Oh, yes. I know what I wanted to ask. I also want to know what it actually feels like when you're taking off here and when you actually take off. What is the physical feeling as well as the emotional feeling.

Eileen Collins: Well, of course, leading up to a launch, you’re not sitting here like this. You’re on your back. The orbiter is in the vertical, so to speak, and it can be - I don't want to say painful, but very uncomfortable laying on your back for that length of time. So you want the launch to happen. …. but actually the launch itself, when the main engines light, there’s a little bit of a tilt, then it comes back. The boosters light. You feel the lift off. You feel the shake. The orbiters start shaking so much that your hands go like this on the buttons, and you have to be careful that you don't push the wrong one. The same thing with your switches. You want to be sure you grab the right switch. There’s quite a bit of vibration in the first two-and-a-half minutes when you're on the boosters.

Both my launches were night launches so we had a lot of lights flashing in the windows from the main engines and the boosters, and the sound - It sounds very similar to what you hear when you're watching a launch except it’s louder. .....it does sound like fire burning around you. Of course, you're in the suit and the helmet so a lot of it sounds muffled. Once the booster separates - Oh, by the way, when you're under the acceleration of the booster, you go up to two-and-a-half times the force of gravity. The acceleration is pushing back on your chest.

When the booster separates, you're back to one G momentarily. You feel comfortable. You can move around a little bit if you need to, reach the switches if you need to, then the remainder of the second phase, you slowly accelerate back to two Gs and then to three Gs, and finally, when you're three Gs, you can - Say for example, if I were holding something the weighed one pound, it would feel like three pounds, under the force three Gs. If you had a lot of equipment, survival equipment on your suit, you can feel that force, and in some respects, if it's not loose enough, you'll have trouble breathing during the launch. I always make sure my equipment and my suit is loose enough that I don't get problems with them.

And then when the main engines cut off, you are immediately in microgravity. I remember on my first flight I took a pencil out of my suit and I held it in front of me, and it floated and that's how you know, it works. You know. We made it.

Interviewer: How about emotionally? I know you must have so many things on your mind you really don't have time to be scared, but there must be something on your mind emotionally that you're thinking about.

Eileen Collins: I really think if you start bringing emotion into it - and this is just the total truth - you're going to be distracted from your job. You've got to focus on your job, and that's why it's important to have - following your procedures so you have a plan in mind of what you're going to do in every stage of the launch and after that, and when you actually .... do what you said you were going to do......looking at......a lot of this is planned in our procedure in flight, but I think if you really focus on that and looking at the numbers, and looking around and making sure your switches and everything's in the right place, you're going to be focused on your job, and you're not going to have time to get emotional. You know, you can get emotional. But then you don't have time either. So I really think that the training that you have - I think if you didn’t do any training at all in the space shuttle, you'd be scared to death, but because we train and train and train, we know that we're doing. We know all the systems. We're very confident in our procedures of our jobs, then, it's not a piece of cake, but it's as close as we can get to being a piece of cake, because you know what you’re doing.

Interviewer: Are you more comfortable flying yourself, or flying a commercial airliner?

Eileen Collins: Definitely more comfortable flying yourself. My husband is a commercial airline pilot, so I need to defer to him and say, I'm comfortable when he's flying. He does a good job. I used to fly with Dick in the Air Force before we were married, and he does a really good job. For the most part.......There are times when you have to fly commercially, and you do that.

F: Okay........equipment out. A couple quick photos, okay?

Interviewer: There we go.

Large section completely inaudible.

Eileen Collins: ...................But primarily...... that'll happen at 7 hours and 17 minutes of flight, so we will be very busy setting up our computers, and going through our procedures...... 30 degrees, and do some more tests ........ And one minute after we get separation, I will actually fly the orbiter....... a little bit out of ..... separation and ... minutes after that we do ..... separation...... one hour..... Throughout our mission, the ground control ....... configure it to higher orbit.....attitudes and altitudes…. and they won't be done with that.... after placing one.....

Interviewer: Tell me a little about your eating while you’re on the flight. Sleeping, and do you get any type of relaxation?

Eileen Collins: I do have very little time for relations. Time on orbit is very precious to me..... so I don't assume we'll be relaxing very much, but there are things that need to be done. We need to eat. We take a few minutes on breaks. They are scheduled, I think, for about 30 minutes or an hour for meal time, and you use that for preparation and cleaning and cooking the food. I usually eat a small amount of fish and vegetables ........Then, of course, you clean up and you get ready for your next activity. As far as sleeping, you can sleep anywhere you want in the orbiter. Mainly you look for a place that's quiet and that’s not going to have a lot of traffic ......

Interviewer: [Inaudible].

Eileen Collins: No, we try to pick our places. We kind of negotiate... where... and both my flights ...... stairs, so I could go up to the flight deck immediately if I needed to. ......And I find that to be a rather quite place to get the [sands] going. I sleep very well. We're scheduled for eight hours of sleep, although, I usually don't sleep the full time, but I find it very easy to sleep. You don't get any pressure points. You roll around. Go your left side, go to your right side. It’s very, very comfortable.

Interviewer: How do you explain to your daughter what you do?

Eileen Collins: Well, you know, I tell her about the space shuttle, and what it looks like and what it does. I tell her....suit. She knows that the space shuttle goes in orbit around the earth...... I think a lot of children have misconceptions of that . Just a couple of days ago, she asked me, "Mommy, have you been to the moon?" and I had to explain to her that space ships don’t go to the moon, that we don’t have enough fuel to get there, and so she's starting to understand. She's only three years old and she doesn't really understand the enormity of what we're doing, but I think she’ll see her first launch — her first real launch this April when we go up. It should be about sunrise, so it should be a pretty good show.

Interviewer: I have a four year old. I asked him is he could ask a question of you, what would it be. He wanted to know, when you’re flying the shuttle …….China……

Eileen Collins: It’s very interesting because ……California, Florida, .......In space - When you're up in space, you're in a certain place. You’re move very fast around the earth. You’re moving 18,000 miles an hour. You look at the earth .......I've never seen any UFOs. I've never seen anything spiritual or ...... up there. Other than there is something special about space flight. You're in a whole unique physical environment and if you could see the earth, it’s breathtaking. It’s blue and white. Beautiful. And I think in a way that could be considered a spiritual experience, because mentally we feel like it’s someplace you’ve never been, and if you look at the earth and think about all the history that took place. You look down at the middle East, or Europe, or the United States.........

Interviewer: Okay, I want to thank you.

Tape ends.