The Provocateurs:

Des Dearlove:

Hello and welcome to The Provocateurs Podcast where we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some incredible people. I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50 and this is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. My co-host today is Steve Goldbach. Steve leads Deloitte’s sustainability practice in the US. He’s also the author along with Geoff Tuff of two bestselling books, Detonate, which came out in 2018 and Provoke, which inspired this podcast series. And the final book in the trilogy, Hone is forthcoming and will be with us and available in September this year, 2025. Steve, it’s great to see you.

Steven Goldbach:

Des, it’s great to see you too and I’m really excited to be back on the podcast and I am super excited to have Eileen Collins join us today. Eileen is one of those inspirational people that you hope to meet once in your lifetime. She is a retired astronaut from NASA and a former Air Force Colonel, and in 1995, she became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle flying the discovery to the Russian Mir station. In 1999, she became the first woman to command a space shuttle mission. The STS-90 was launched with a Chandra X-ray Observatory payload, the newest space telescope since the Hubble, it would go on to capture X-rays not previously seen in deep space images, capturing astonishing images and new data. Eileen’s final mission in 2005 was commanding the return to flight mission, the first since the space shuttle Columbia disaster. Eileen – and now Eileen is the time for you to pick up that book – is the author, together with Jonathan Ward of the 2021 book Through The Glass Ceiling to the Stars, the story of the First American to command a space mission. She is also the subject of a landmark documentary film, Space Woman, which premiered in November 2024. And where can they find the documentary, Eileen?

Eileen Collins:

Well, the documentary is not available yet to the general public. We’re hoping by the end of 2025 it’ll be out there. So I’ll be posting it or eventually get a platform so everyone can see it.

Steven Goldbach:

That’s amazing. And we hope that it gets picked up and if we were to list the awards and honors that Eileen has received it would literally take up this entire show. But I would just note that she was recognized by the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of 300 women who have changed the world. Eileen, welcome. It is great to have you. It was great to get to hear you speak earlier this year at our Chief Sustainability Officer Summit in Westlake, Texas. Des, she was amazing. And so maybe Eileen, a place to start now that we’re all acquainted with your amazing background is just what’s your back story? How did you arrive at this moment with all these honors? How did a little girl from the outside of Elmira, New York grow up dreaming of being a pilot and then an astronaut?

Eileen Collins:

Well, thanks. Well, first of all, Des and Steve, thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be here. I’m happy to share with you and your audience the things that have worked for me and actually things that have not worked for me. To answer your question, I think it was really having a passion for something and for me that passion was flying. I had this burning desire in me. Honestly, I don’t know where it came from, but I just wanted to fly. And it might’ve been a sense of freedom. As much as I love the little town that I grew up in, I love the people there, I have this explorer gene in me where I always felt like I had to get out and do something new and different to find something new and different to really understand the world that we live in. And I think that’s a big general description.

The outlet for me that was something I actually could do was to fly airplanes. I had to raise the money myself. When I was 16, I started getting part-time jobs. They were all really whatever I could get. I worked in a hospital, I worked in a pizza restaurant, I worked at my church, I worked at my school. Any money that I could make … I worked at a golf course. But any money that I could make, I saved for flying lessons. And by the time I was 20 years old, I had enough money to get a license and that was when things really started taking off. But to answer your question, I think it really is having a passion and maybe seeing something in the world that is missing that you think that you maybe have the ability to go out and fill that. And there weren’t many women pilots back in 1978 when I first went into the Air Force, the US Air Force. So I think that all came together.

Des Dearlove:

But it can’t have been an easy journey. You make it sound as though it’s all very matter of fact. And even saying it’s one thing to be a woman pilot, but to be an astronaut. What do you think propelled your ambition and made you think that you could break through and do this?

Eileen Collins:

Well, there were a couple of specific things to answer that my hometown, Elmira, New York, is also the location of the National Soaring Museum gliders. There’s a glider field called Harris Hill, which is right across from the National Soaring Museum. And when I was a kid, my mom sent me to summer camp up there … And not to fly. That was too expensive. But we just had a regular summer camp that was nearby and I’d watch these gliders flying overhead and I would say, “What would it be like to be in one of those?” And my dad would take us to the airport. It was cheap entertainment. For your listeners, if they have kids, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on your kids. You can do cheap stuff like we did. We’d sit on the hood of the car at the airport and we’d watch planes take off and land. That was fascinating to me.

So I started reading books. Now my mom took us to the library. That was just something to do. It was free. Back in those days she just dropped us off and went and did her thing and us kids would run around the library. And I found books. Books were my door to the world outside of my hometown. Of course, as a kid, I read, you can name it. I read books on horses, dogs, bugs. Nature was always interesting. But when I found the section on flying airplanes, I started checking out books and reading them and there were so many. Fate is the Hunter is one that I’m thinking about. God Is My Co-Pilot. There was a book called The Stars at Noon, which is about Jackie Cochran who started the Women Air Force service Pilots in World War II. And in that book I went, “Oh, look at all those women pilots. Maybe I could do that someday.”

I think that we need to encourage our kids to read books more. Today they’re all on their phone and they’re looking at what their friends are doing and living, I want to say, not a full life. And I think if you really want to live a full life, find books on great people that did great things. And I think Jackie Cochran was one of those people who she came from nothing and she worked her way up in the world and she started this amazing organization for women pilots that really helped in World War II. And she became a role model for me. And I think that that really answers your question. I think very specifically reading books. I also read books about military pilots. Now, there were no women military pilots back, obviously, in World War II that actually fought in combat. But the men, they were still my role models and I loved reading about their interesting adventures. And of course wars are horrible. Nobody wants to go to war. But it was really the flying part that captured my imagination. The airplanes, the way you fly an airplane and the kind of people that they were. And I think that’s really what made me decide to apply to be an Air Force pilot.

Steven Goldbach:

Speaking of the people in the culture of flying, I think oftentimes the public who doesn’t have the insight into what one of these takes often hears that it was a successful mission and they assume that everything just goes to plan and goes easy. But I’m sure that in any of these missions that we all perceive on the ground as perfectly successful, lots of technical challenges in flight, and that’s got to be both … You’re in space, so that’s nothing simple, I guess it’s safe to say in space. So how are these kinds of challenges resolved in space and does it take a special culture to be able to address these challenges and how do you create that? I’d be curious if you could just tell a few stories in that vein.

Eileen Collins:

Yeah. A couple of questions there. Those are really interesting great questions. I think my first answer is the training in the practice. We have what we would call a training team. They were a set of instructors. They each had an area where they were really an expert in a specific system on the space shuttle and nowadays the space station, not just how this system works, but how it fails. So the way you really learn about a system … Now in system, I’m talking about the space shuttle main engines, the space shuttle propulsion, on orbit, propulsion, maybe the hydraulics, the electrical, the computers, how do all the systems work, how do they operate normally? But you really learn about a system when you learn how it fails. And so we would work with our training team. And by the way, as we got more advanced, we worked with mission control, which were different people. They were still engineers, but they were the ones that actually worked in mission control during an actual flight. And our training team would work with us really for a much longer period of time in helping us understand the system.

And we would simulate segments of a mission, whether it was launch, entry after the mission, some on orbit phase like rendezvous, and we would fail systems. Maybe the auxiliary power unit failed or maybe engine number two failed, maybe a set of maneuvering jets failed. And we had to immediately make a decision as to how are we going to complete the segment of the mission and when that’s over, how do we bring back the systems that failed? All of that we learned through study and training. Sometimes study is really kind of hard to motivate yourself to get started, but the way we did that was we would compete with each other. And if you were the one when the malfunction hit, if you were the one that knew the answer, good on you. So those kind of things would really motivate us. I would say practicing and whether it’s choreographing or in our case, setting up simulations that really motivated us to study and then it motivated us to do well when the actual … I want to say training period was taking place. And then you hoped it never happened in orbit.

My first, my third and my fourth mission had some pretty challenging failures on them. I talk about that in my book, so I won’t go into any detail now, but I really want to answer your question. It’s in preparation. And let’s say for example, so one of the things I do today is I’m a speaker, even if it’s a speech I’ve given before, I do it out loud three times the day before I’m scheduled for the speech. It doesn’t matter how often I’ve done it, I still need to practice.

The other thing, okay, so I’m going to switch to your second question, which is on developing a culture, because you could talk forever about a culture and I would say the culture in the astronaut side of the space shuttle … I think we really had different cultures, but the culture on the astronaut side was really one of being the best you can possibly be. And that has to do with the type of people that we hired. People that you get along with. And we know we’re all fascinated with … Like you can watch these space shows on TV where maybe the astronauts don’t get along with each other or there’s some human interest story going on over there. Well, in general, those things don’t happen. In general, the crew works together. We help each other out. If somebody’s getting behind on something in one segment of the mission, somebody will, Hey, can I help you get ahead on your schedule? Can I do some of the task for you? And in training, we try to help each other out. And I think that has to do first of all with the type of people that we hire, but secondly, with the type of leadership that we have. The crew commander as well as, I would say, your training team lead, your flight director, are all people that want the mission to succeed.

And we like to compete as far as what we know, but we don’t like to compete as far as anything that would hurt the mission, if you know what I mean. So I think that that’s just a very brief description of the type of culture. I want to say that … And I don’t want to get too far ahead because you’ll probably ask me later about leadership. But it’s what I call humility, and that is really not being quiet and shy, I don’t think humility is not being quiet and shy. Humility is a willingness to listen and to share and to help other people around you do their best.

Coping with Stress and Danger

Des Dearlove:

We are going to ask you about leadership. Of course, we’re going to ask you about leadership. Not every day we get somebody who’s led a space mission on the show. We’ve had some great people, but you are unique, so we are going to ask you about that. But just to stick with some of the technical problems and without wanting to spoil the book, because people I’m sure will want to read all the things in the book, but on your 1999 mission, so that was STS-93, the initial launch was halted half a second before the engines were due to fire up due to a faulty sensor, which was giving the indication that there was a fuel leak. You’re sitting on top of this machine and half a second before you’re supposed to fire up the engines, which presumably the engines would’ve all had to be replaced. It’s a huge thing and you’re down to the last half second.

One thing I want to ask is … Two parts to this question too. How do you cope with that stress and danger in such a matter of fact way? But the other thing I find amazing, and I think people listening to the show will find amazing is for you to talk about being a speaker. I know I’ve heard you talk about when you went to the Clinton White House and you had a panic attack. You’re going to meet the president. For goodness’s sake, the thing you’re doing when you’re sitting on the spacecraft on the launch pad and you’re cool and calm and yet you are about to meet the president and you suddenly have a moment. And I was very taken by what you said that you had to become the shuttle commander. You almost switched personas, separated yourself from being Eileen and became the shuttle commander in order to meet the president. Talk us through some of that.

Eileen Collins:

That is very, very true and it is amazing what the little techniques you come up with when you’re faced with a situation like that. Now, the first part of your question is about on my third mission when we had the launch countdown taking place, and my answer to that is you are on the launch, you’re on the rocket and you’re watching the clock countdown and you’re inside of 10, nine, eight, seven and then the clock stops and it was bouncing back and forth, eight, nine, eight, nine, eight, nine. The clock that I’m looking at, and I had never seen that before in training. Well, here we are just like a split second from engines starting, and my thought was you have to be ready to either launch or to scrub. You have to be ready for both of them. That is what comes through training and through thinking through these scenarios before they actually happen to you.

Of course you have to think through thousands of scenarios and most of them never happen. So this one happened, and I think my first thought is what do I have control over and what do I not have control over? I do not have control over the launch countdown clock. I can stop it, but I can’t restart it. As commander, I can stop the clock. That’s another question. There are times when you would as commander have to stop the clock. But I heard the word cut off on the radio that was coming from the launch control center, so I knew that there was something bad that happened. I have to be ready at that point, well, we’re not going to launch, but I have to be ready to get out as quickly as possible. So I’m not worried about me. There’s no emotions except possibly my heart is beating faster and I’m thinking, thinking, thinking. We might have to do what’s called a mode one, which is where the crew has to unbuckle and run out as fast as we can. And we take a slide wire. It’s like a zip line that you would take from the launch pad down to the bunker.

If there is a hydrogen leak or even an oxygen leak, which is flammable … I’ll just leave it at that. You could have a bad situation. We train for that. So I’m sitting, I’m listening, I’m ready to do an immediate mode one. I’m listening. I told my crew we’re going to be okay. The other thing is you don’t want your crew to panic. So, “Hey crew, we’re going to be okay. We’ve seen situations like this before. Everybody listen to the radio. Let’s get ready to …” I don’t want to say the words mode one because people might start leaving. I said, “We want to get ready to get out in case they call.” And so these are all the things. I’m running these things through my head. We also had that particular launch, we had two serious malfunctions. We ended up launching three days later. We had two serious malfunctions going uphill. We had a hydrogen leak out of one of our engines, and we had an electrical short in one of our AC buses, and the crew had minimal work to do on those, but we really were thinking we have to be ready for the next failure. So it’s all training, training, training.

Now you mentioned the White House. Before I flew that mission and I had been named as a shuttle commander, I got word that the White House wanted to announce the first woman space shuttle commander from the White House, and Bill Clinton was the president at the time and I had to prepare a few remarks. So I prepared a few remarks and headed up there. I thought it was okay. Brought my family with me and we went in. We met the president. That was fine. The moment of panic was when we left the Oval Office I looked across the room and there’s this room called the Roosevelt Room, and that’s where normally the president will make announcements. It’s quite a small room, but I saw a bank of cameras along the wall. I saw some famous reporters that I recognized. Sally Ride was sitting in the front row, and it was the first time I met her, by the way. And all these famous people were in there. And I looked in the door, I just snuck a little peek in the door, and that’s when I had what I would call a panic moment.

I had never physically panicked in an airplane. There’s only two times in my life that I think I panicked. The first time I was 13 years old and I was almost in a fight. That’s a whole other story. And this was the second time. I felt sweat start at the top of my head, and the sweat went down to the bottom of my feet. And I turned to my husband and I said, “I’m not going in there. I’m done. I’m not doing this.” Because he tried to talk me out of it. I knew I had to go in there and make my little speech. I started thinking, just go in there and be the woman commander. You’re not Eileen anymore. Just go in there and be the woman commander. Be what people expect you to be. It’s only going to take 10 minutes and it’s going to be over. And so I did it. It was over. I went back to work and I was happy after I went back to work because I am a pilot. I’m an operational person. At least back in those days, not very good on camera. I had not trained for that except maybe a very small amount of training. But I was not prepared for that.

What is the lesson to be learned? You have to be prepared. I really think if I had practiced and trained for walking in a group of people that were putting their cameras on me, if I had trained for that, I think I would’ve been better at it. And that’s really the answer. I could go on and on, but that’s really the answer to the question. Prepare, train. Understand what you’re afraid of. Everybody’s afraid of something. I’m trying to think of a good example. Understand what you’re afraid of. I don’t like bugs for example. I used to read books on bugs so I could learn more about them when I was a kid. If you really understand what it is that you’re afraid of, I think that gives you a feeling of control over it. We don’t always have a hundred percent control over everything. We have to realize what we control and what we don’t control. But I think if you read and understand and learn and expose yourself a little bit to the things that you’re afraid of, it will help you have more courage in life to do the things that will really make a difference.

Des Dearlove:

It’s good to understand that even someone like you, has things that alarm you or can make you panic because I think what we tend to think everybody else, certainly someone with your career and your background, that you are immovable, fearless, but we all have something and that’s what makes us human. 

Breaking the Glass Ceiling at NASA

Steven Goldbach:

The thing that I take away from that is it’s amazing how the capacity of the human brain to invent fear in just any situations that we aren’t used to. And we can be fearful of things that have no foundation in reality. And you’ve trained your brain to not be fearful of some incredibly precarious situations through your preparation and through your experience. And it just goes to show the capacity of what it takes to prepare for those kinds of situations. But the brain is eminently trainable. It’s just when we come across the unexpected, it can be fearful. Speaking of things that are novel, the title of your book is Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars. So let’s talk a little bit about how it was difficult to break that glass ceiling at NASA and how you were novel to many people and how you helped them overcome their – sense your capabilities and those of your fellow women.

Eileen Collins:

Yeah. I would say yes, I was the first woman to be a shuttle pilot and commander, but there were still other women before me that did other things. For example, there were several women mission specialists … Sally Ride’s the most famous that actually flew on the shuttle before me. Now Sally, she took the brunt of the silly questions and people asking her, how are you going to do your hair in space and what kind of clothes are you going to wear? Questions that the men didn’t get asked. And Sally was really offended by that. She told me actually before my first mission, she called me on the phone and was talking a little bit about some of the things she had to deal with with the press and those things bothered her. She was very intelligent and she wanted to talk about why are we going to space. She was an arm operator. Robot arm operator, and she was doing experiments. So she really took the brunt of it. I took a little bit of it, but I think having Sally’s, I want to say mentorship was a big help.

There were also several women mission specialists in the astronaut office. They were doing fantastic work as they are still today. And just very professional. They weren’t out there promoting themselves because they were women. They just didn’t do that. And I didn’t really honestly didn’t do that myself. People came to me. But I didn’t want to flaunt the fact, oh, I’m the first woman and try to make myself famous because of that. I wanted to be the best pilot I could be. So I think to answer your question, for me, I took on that role as a challenge. You’re going to be the first woman pilot and this is when John Young, who was the Apollo 16 moon walker, called me and told me I was hired and I would be the first woman. I took that on as a challenge and I wanted to be the best I could be. So I studied probably twice as hard as I really needed to. Tried to prepare for situations that honestly may never happen, but I wanted to be ready because I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to be the one that came in and saved everybody, AKA Star Trek or some of these science fiction movies that you see. I wanted to come in and be the hero, so I was preparing for that.

And so I really think that I stand on the shoulders of the women that went … Oh, and I want to mention there were women flight controllers and there were also women that went … They were called the Mercury 13 way back in 1961. They went through the physical testing and mental testing. They proved that women have the ability to be astronauts, and then as I mentioned earlier, the women Air Force service pilots, the World War II pilots that flew airplanes. So I really think I stand on their shoulders. So knowing about them and actually working with some of them I think really helped a lot. I think mentorship is important, and I like to tell people, if you don’t have a mentor, try to be a mentor to try to help someone. And I like to mentor men as well as women because I think it’s important that we help everyone that is … Maybe we see somebody that needs help, it’s important that we reach out to them. So I hope that answered your question.

I think probably the feeling I get mostly from your question is how happy I was to have the challenge to be the first woman pilot and commander of a space shuttle. I was actually very happy to have that challenge because I like to work hard and I like to really push the mission of space exploration because it’s a mission I’ve always loved as far back as I can remember, I love the mission. And I wish we were farther into that mission. It’s expensive to explore space. And I get disappointed when I see how slow it takes to get people back to the moon and onto Mars. But I think that’s what keeps me even today, staying active as much as I can in the space business and helping promote that mission. So that’s the challenge I love.

Becoming a Collaborative Leader

Des Dearlove:

I’m going to take you a little bit back to leadership. Talk about your, perhaps a little bit about your personal style. I know the word humility came up in conversations earlier. But you’ve talked a lot about training as well. Did you consciously train your leadership style? Is it something that evolved as you were doing as your career unfolded, or is it something you thought right now, now I need to train as a leader?

Eileen Collins:

So that is a very interesting question. I would say that when I joined the Air Force, we were given leadership training. It was not a choice. You didn’t like, “Oh, I think I’ll take a course in leadership.” Everyone was given leadership training and it was everything from reading about techniques of leadership and reading about great leaders to actually doing exercises where you would go out with your little group and they would give you a challenge and you’d have to figure it out. And they were mostly physical challenges. If you would watch how people in your group … Some people would like to take over and some people would sit over there and they try to figure out the answer, and some people were just completely out of it and you felt bad for them, but you’d see all kinds. I never liked that leadership training because there would be conflict that would come out, there would be tough decisions. And you can imagine this in the field. I’m sure many of your listeners have done these leadership training courses in the field. Even though I don’t like them, I recommend doing them. It’s something that’s hard and uncomfortable, but it makes you better.

And so we did a lot of those back in the military. I even went through survival training and in my book, I talked about how survival training, the challenge of that changed me. Both the physical side as well. They had a POW camp and we were all “captured” by the “enemy” and we went through this prisoner of war. I say POW, it’s prisoner of war training camp with the Air Force. So I had done all that training when I came to NASA. Now, the civilians that come to NASA, they get sent to different leadership training courses. Like there’s a cold weather survival. I could name a bunch of them. There’s one in the Rocky Mountains. There’s an underwater program down in the Florida Keys. It’s not necessarily built for leadership training, but you still get leadership training from some of these. And they’re really good. You learn about yourself. You will do things in these leadership … I say you will. I surprised myself because I did things I didn’t expect that I would do.

So once I came to NASA, I felt like I had my leadership style established, but not totally true. I was more of an autocratic type leader in the military because I thought that’s what they wanted. And I would tell people, oh, you should do this or you should do that. Honestly, I don’t think that works. It definitely did not work at NASA. But back in my later years in the Air Force, I learned that I needed to be more of a collaborative type leader. So my leadership style changed when I was … I’m going to say in my early 30s if I finally came around that Eileen, you don’t have to know it all. You really have to know your people and know which people to put in which roles. That’s a very difficult thing to do, at least for me. So one of the things the leader has to do is know their people enough to say, “You need to be in this position, this job. You need to be over here.” And put the right people in the right places and then give them the authority to do their job. Don’t micromanage them.

And I had to learn that because I was a micromanager and I was more of an autocrat, and I had to stop doing that. And I think being at NASA, working with people that really knew what they were doing, highly motivated, intelligent, I was able, once I became a shuttle commander, I’d tell my crew, okay, you’re in charge of deploying the telescope, you’re in charge of logistics, you’re in charge of this system, whether it’s on the payload or on the shuttle and let them do their job. And I think I finally learned that after making mistakes throughout my career.

I had a student way back when I was in my 20s. I had a student tell me, “Ma’am, could you not talk to me so much in the airplane?” And I went, “Oh, I didn’t realize I was talking to you that much.” I said, “Okay. Well, let’s do that. I’ll stop talking and let you …” Apparently my talking was interfering with his thinking. So I started talking less. Once I became a shuttle commander, I remember one of my crewmates, Wendy Lawrence, was in charge of all the logistics transfer to the space station and back. And at that point in my life, I had matured to the point I said to Wendy, you’re in charge of the logistics. I’m not going to tell you what to do. If you have a problem, come to me and I’ll help you solve your problem. Please just keep me up to speed on what you’re doing and make sure we talk to each other. And I let her do her job. I left her alone and she did a great job. And so I think through a series of mistakes … I talk a little bit about them in my book. I think I became the right leader for the particular position that I was in.

I wasn’t perfect. I look back and I think there were other things I would do differently, but I think I was the right leader for that last mission that I flew because … We can probably get into this later. I felt it was my job to keep people working together. I didn’t want conflict to develop. If it did develop, I wanted to help make sure that they worked together, that they didn’t work against each other.

Steven Goldbach:

And that’s where I want to dig in a little bit, Eileen. How do you think about in a situation where one small thing can become a really big thing in the context of a space mission? I’m trying to think about how I would deal with analogous situations if I were a leader. And you talked about trying not to micromanage your team. And this is a situation that I could imagine that lots of leaders would say, “Well, I need to micromanage this because anything that goes wrong could be disastrous.” And so how do you build up a sense of trust that someone is going to be sufficiently detail oriented and what you’re managing is that person’s attention to detail rather than the individual tasks themselves. I find it interesting that you are focused on the way the team is working together rather than the outcomes in how you’re describing it. So tell us a little bit about that orientation and how you trained yourself on that front.

Eileen Collins:

Well, outcome is important. Outcome is very important. And I think to me, I see that as mission. We had a mission obviously, but the mission was broken down into about 12 main objectives. And as the commander, I had to make sure that I was ultimately responsible along with my flight director, he’s on the ground, but I’m ultimately responsible up in space that those specific number of objectives are completed and they’re listed in order of preference. So if there’s ever a conflict, the solution goes to what is the higher priority. Which by the way is one of the techniques I used to resolve conflict is which is the higher priority.

I would say the best training to be a shuttle commander … This was a joke. I used to say this when I commanded my second and last mission. The best training to be a shuttle commander is to be a parent. Because you started your question with the little things, conflict can build over little things that ultimately are not important. And if you’re married, you know exactly what I’m talking about because you see married couples that go at it over something that is not important at all. It’s like who cares? And I think it ends up being a little power struggle, and I see this over in my family, I just see this over and over again. And I would say what you’re arguing about or what your conflict is about, where is that in the order of priority? If it’s where are we going to go eat tonight? I don’t really care. That’s not important.

Or what color is my shirt going to be? Because we do actually have to make those decisions. What color shirt am I going to wear in space on the day that we do the crew picture, what shirt are we going to wear? We get a crew picture taken and what are we going to put in there? We have a patch. How do we design the patch? These are things the crews work together on, but ultimately those are nice things and we need to have them, but we don’t want conflict to develop over them. We certainly don’t want conflict to develop over a mission objective. So I’m not sure if I’m answering your question or not, but I will say it was important to me as commander to know what are the … I’m going to say what was the number one strategic objective of our flight? The last one was to get the shuttle flying again safely after the Columbia accident. Everything that I did, I came back to that number one objective, get the shuttle flying safely again after the Columbia accident. And then we had broken down into objectives and it was everything from resupplying the space station to making sure that we did an exterior survey of the shuttle.

I’m not going to get in too much detail, but one of the causes of the Columbia accident was a breach from the heat shield. So we do an external survey. We had to be able to repair certain types of damage that might’ve happened to our heat shield. We had to safely run room dock with a space station, transfer 5,000 pounds of logistics. If whatever conflict we were having didn’t deal with those main objectives, it was like, “Okay. Make a decision right now and get it over with and put it behind us because we need to stay focused on the important parts of this mission.” And I found myself doing a lot of that as commander and keeping my crew … And my crew is great, by the way. They were wonderful, but you want to keep everybody … Because even I was getting lost on, okay, so what are we going to do when we go out with somebody on some social event? Let’s just do it. It doesn’t matter. Let’s not let conflict develop about it. Let’s do those things, but don’t let conflict break down crew cohesiveness.

And I would say the biggest thing that was causing conflict was how much money was available for this mission. We didn’t have money to do everything. We had to decide for example, repair techniques. There must’ve been dozens of repair techniques to repair a space shuttle heat shield during the spacewalk. You couldn’t possibly fund all of them. So as we went along, some of them had to be down selected. Can’t do that anymore. It’s being down selected. But then you had to get those people, those engineers on board like, “Hey, we loved your idea. It was great. Just didn’t have the money to do everything, so now I need you to get on board with this other idea and work with them.” And sometimes that’s really hard to do.

And I think because people take it personally when their little project is not going to fly, so get them on board with another team, work together. It’s amazing how people get really personally and emotionally involved in what they’re doing in their work. And that can be something really difficult. And I found that’s where it’s important for a commander to make the effort to talk to the people individually and keep them motivated as part of the mission. Even though their pet project wasn’t … That’s not the right word, pet project. Even though their assigned project was not selected. I just use that as an example, but there were several. Keep in mind that last mission I flew was after an accident where seven people lost their lives so emotions were running very high. And I ended up finding myself in a role where I was calming people down and helping them get refocused on getting the shuttle flying again.

Des Dearlove:

You’re talking about mission, and I’ve heard you say in the past that you had your own personal mission, not to be the first woman to do it, but to be the best pilot you could possibly be. When we talk about mission in that kind of context, we use the word in business these days, we use the word purpose a lot. I’m not sure whether there is a difference between them. But how important is it to define what we’re trying to do in terms of a higher calling so that you can do that very process you’ve been describing where you’ve got something higher to appeal to, which should and can obviously diffuse potential conflict?

Eileen Collins:

Yeah. Well, the higher calling is space exploration, getting people off planet earth into space, living and working on space stations, returning to the moon, building research stations on the moon, learning how to live and work on another planetary body like the moon, and eventually sending people to Mars. Planet Mars, which is much farther. The moon, you can get there in three days with, I would say, conventional propulsion, chemical propulsion, like just your normal rocket engines. Three days to get to the moon. But it’s six months to get to Mars. Sometimes it takes two years depending on … Planets move around. So sometimes it takes two years to get to Mars.

We need to, I want to say develop the equipment that will keep the astronauts alive while we’re on the surface of the moon and get that to be very reliable equipment. I’m talking water recycling, carbon dioxide, recycling, just life support systems. Get them working. And you got the moon, it has dust, it has no atmosphere, it’s got radiation, it’s got all of these threats to your life. But we’ve got to get those working on the moon well enough so eventually when we go to Mars, we have a failure on … You don’t want to have a failure on Mars because you’re so far away. And it takes so much longer to get back or to send equipment. So that would be, I would say the higher calling.

Three Fundamental Elements of Leadership

And back to just want to say one other thing about leadership styles to touch on one thing you asked. What I learned in the military, three elements of leadership that are the basis for everything else, the first is knowledge of your job. Just knowing you don’t need to know everything, but you need to know what is the mission. You need to understand the mission. The second one is people, I mentioned earlier. Getting the right people in the right places and always communicating. And the third is integrity. And that is a whole nother subject. We think integrity is honesty, which it is, honesty, but it’s also trusting that the person will be honest with you in the future. There has to be that element of trust in leadership and that’s something that takes time to develop and those techniques I talked about earlier. So those three things I learned as a second lieutenant in the military a long time ago. I never forgot them because they worked. Now there’s more. That’s not everything, but to me that’s the foundation. Knowing your job, knowing your people, and having a sense of integrity.

Steven Goldbach:

Eileen, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I think we are unfortunately out of time in our podcast, but we would love to continue to have you develop lessons and we’ll make sure to share when the documentary is released and link to the book. Last very quick question, who else do you admire and should we have on this podcast? Who would you recommend that we speak to?

Eileen Collins:

What first comes to mind is one of the Apollo astronauts. Now there were 12 men that walked on the moon. Only four of them are still alive and two of them are pretty active. One is Harrison Schmitt. He was a senator after he left NASA, but he’s a geologist and he walked on the moon on Apollo 17. I think if you could get one of those four. Or even Gerry Griffin who’s still active, he was a flight director during Apollo. I would recommend a book called Apollo Race to the Moon. And although it talks about how the Apollo program happened, it helps you realize how to do difficult missions. And I would say any of those Apollo flight directors or astronauts … Their availability, it’s very hard to get on their schedule.

Des Dearlove:

We’re very, very fortunate and very grateful for getting you so thank you so much. But that’s all we have time for. Huge thanks to our guest, to Eileen Collins and to you all for listening. This is The Provocateurs podcast. We’ve been Des Dearlove and Steve Goldbach. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Provocateurs. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please hit the like button and share with your friends and colleagues and we’ll see you next time.