THE ASTRO'S!

Eileen Collins

I was the first female Shuttle pilot, and, after piloting two missions, I became the first (and currently only) female Shuttle commander. I commanded STS-93, on which the Chandra X-ray Observatory was deployed. My hometown is Elmira, New York. In 2005, I will command the STS-114 Return To Flight mission, which will carry a crew of seven to the International Space Station.

Gene Cernan

I was the last man on the Moon. I was the commander of Apollo 17, the last manned mission to land on the Moon in 1972. Alan Shepard was my hero. I was named as Alan Shepard’s backup commander for Apollo 14. By the time of that flight, I actually had more spaceflight experience than Shepard. As a pilot, I became the second American to walk in space during the Gemini IX mission in 1966. In 1969, Commander Tom Stafford and I piloted a lunar lander to within 8 nautical miles of the surface of the Moon, in preparation for the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Jan Davis

I am a veteran of three Space Shuttle missions, including the first U.S. flight to carry a Russian cosmonaut. Today, I am involved in spaceflight, as the director of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. I flew with the first Japanese astronaut on the Shuttle during my first flight. Persistence was a key to my success. I applied to the astronaut program three times before being accepted. I was a mission specialist on Endeavour STS-47, Discovery STS-60, and Discovery STS-85. Science experiments were conducted on a Spacelab module during the STS-47 1992 joint U.S.-Japanese mission. I served as payload commander on the STS-85 1997 Shuttle flight.

Ed Lu

I was NASA’s science officer on the Expedition 7 mission to the International Space Station from April until October 2003. Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and I were the first two-person crew to live on board the Station following the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in February 2003. I became the first NASA astronaut to both launch and land aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. I was one of the first American astronauts to return from a long-duration spaceflight with almost no loss in bone density and little loss in muscle strength. The crew was given an “exercise prescription” for the workout they had to perform. “And, I did extra on top of that on my own."