With NASA Artemis 2 rocket and spacecraft rolls back to the launch pad for an upcoming lunar mission launch, and March being Women’s History Month, now is the ideal time to look”Space woman.”
This brand new feature-length documentary showcases the inspiring achievements of pioneering astronauts Colonel Eileen M. Collinswho rose to become the first female Space Shuttle pilot and commander. Directed by British filmmaker Hannah Berryman and based on Collins’ 2021 memoir, “Through the glass ceiling to the stars” (Arcade), “Spacewoman” follows the remarkable path of a true American hero from humble small-town beginnings.
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Collins resigned from the Air Force in 2005 and from NASA’s Astronaut Corps in 2006, having accumulated over 6,751 hours piloting thirty different aircraft types and logging 872 hours in space.
“I had read Eileen’s book and I really loved the story,” Berryman tells Space. “There were certain things that stood out to me other than she was obviously the first pilot and commander of the shuttle as a woman, which was amazing.”
While her achievements speak for themselves, it was Collins’ struggle to get there that really inspired Berryman to make this film.
“If it had felt like an easy path from a certain kind of background, right in doing everything, it would have felt less interesting to me as a story,” explains Berryman. “But because Eileen didn’t have the easiest background, I thought it was interesting. Also, with her leading the first mission right after the Columbia disaster, I felt that was a way we could create a dramatic and really human emotional narrative from the book.”
A naturally shy person despite her daring achievements in human spaceflight, Collins set the stage for several women who entered NASA’s astronaut program to follow in her footsteps.
“I don’t like to promote myself, and Hannah knows that,” Collins admits. “I’ve always just wanted to be a pilot, be an astronaut, do a good job, explore. I like to go places and read books and do new things.”
“When I retired in 2007, I decided to just work on boards and advisory groups, and I wanted to raise my children. I had no intention of writing a book. Now, this documentary wouldn’t have happened without it.” Collins explains. “But then the pandemic hit in 2020, and I had nothing to do but sit around and Skype meetings. Over the years, I had been approached by my co-author Jonathan Ward, and I finally called him in April 2020 and said, ‘Okay, let’s write the book.’
Even after publishing her book, Collins was reluctant to step further into the limelight when approached.
“The month after it was published I was contacted by producer Keith Haviland, he’s from London. He did ‘The Last Man on the Moon’ on Gene Cernan and several others about space and aviation,” recalls Collins. “And I told him, ‘No, I didn’t want my life up there on the big screen.’ A couple of months passed and I changed my mind, knowing this was going to be a big deal. It was going to be a lot of work, and I had to decide how much of my personal life I wanted to put out there.”
She first met director Hannah Berryman in her hometown of Elmira, New York on the porch of her father’s old house. Once she committed to the project, she was on board.
“I don’t make a decision and do something halfway. I think we had a great team,” Collins recalls. “Everyone got along and we just worked amazing together.”
One of her first milestones seen in the documentary came aboard Discovery in 1995 on STS-63 when she assumed pilot duties during Commander Jim Weatherbee to make history. It may have been an anxiety-inducing moment, but Collins was completely cool under pressure.
“I’m a test pilot, so that’s what I do. NASA actually interviewed me in 1989 as a mission specialist,” she notes. “NASA was like, ‘We’re going to hire you as a pilot because that’s what you are.’ I have been flying since I was 20 years old. For me, I was just doing my job.”
The New York native was also the Atlantis pilot on 1997’s STS-84 when her crew docked with the Russian space station MIR. In 1999, Collins became the first female commander of a US spacecraft with Columbia’s STS-93 mission that deployed the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Her last flight was 2005’s STS-114 as commander of Discovery, the critical “Return to Flight” mission following the catastrophic loss of Columbia in 2003.
“It’s about staying focused on what you’re doing and not thinking about who’s watching me,” Collins explains. “Both of my shuttle landings were at night. I would say it’s much harder to land at night. I’d much rather do a day landing. You have to have very good depth perception, and you have to be very well trained.”
Distilling all the excellent dates of Collins’ time with NASA required Berryman to focus on composing the material to present it for maximum emotional resonance with the audience.
“One of the challenges with any kind of story like this is that you have to be on the edge of their seats a little bit, even though they can see Eileen in front of them and know she’s fine,” adds Berryman. “You want to be in these missions in the moment of it, and feel like you still have that danger like any movie. And also the balancing act between the family story and the mission stories. If you’re making a movie about somebody who’s done some big thing and you just did it, it’s not interesting. We want to know about real people.”
Berryman reminds us that we’re all a mixture of things, and we’re never going to be good at everything at every point, and that ultimately makes it all the more impressive.
“It was really important to keep the human fallibility that they’re all just a family going through this. So when you feel the resolution, you really care. I was happy when we had cinema screenings in the UK in the autumn because people seemed to be really moved and thought Eileen was amazing. You’re more amazing as a real person than if you’re a kypher of awesomeness. If you like the rest of your life has been more moving and that’s been even more impressive.”
Encapsulating one’s lifetime and career in under two hours can seem like a daunting task for the creative team, and for Collins as well, as she strolled down memory lane during production. “Spacewoman” uses a series of intimate scenes curated from archival footage, TV shows and news appearances, and an old VHS video camera.
“My husband Pat and I gave Hannah and her team all our many VHS tapes that we had converted to DVDs, and we had all the NASA stuff,” says Collins. “On the family side, probably one of the happiest times of my life was raising my kids. It was fun looking back at the videos. I watched the movie again Friday night. We showed it at the March Air Force base out in Riverside, California. They wanted me to come in person and we got a standing ovation.
“My daughter, Bridget, has a big part in the film and people came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Your daughter is amazing and she really made the film. It’s funny, for some reason we never take these videos out and show them. I like to tell people that I had the two best jobs in the world. I was a parent and I was an astronaut. There’s a joke I used to tell that the best training for being a shuttle commander is being a parent. Because you have to know how to say no.”
“Spacewoman” launches its theatrical engagement on March 20, 2026.
