With NASA’s Artemis 2 rocket and spacecraft rolling back out to the launch pad for an upcoming moon mission launch, and March being Women’s History Month, now is the ideal time to go see “Spacewoman.”
This brand new feature-length documentary showcases the inspirational accomplishments of pioneering astronaut Col. Eileen M. Collins, who rose to become the first woman space shuttle pilot and commander. Directed by British filmmaker Hannah Berryman and based on Collins’s 2021 memoir, “Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars” (Arcade), “Spacewoman” follows the remarkable trajectory of a true American hero from humble small-town beginnings.
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Collins retired from the Air Force in 2005 and from NASA’s astronaut corps in 2006, having tallied 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 for me apart from obviously her being the first pilot and commander of the shuttle as a woman, which was amazing.”
While her achievements speak for themselves, it was Collin’s struggle to get there that really inspired Berryman to make this movie.
“If it had felt like a straightforward path from a certain kind of background, straight in doing it all, it would have felt less interesting to me as a story”, explains Berryman. “But because Eileen didn’t have the easiest of backgrounds, I thought that was interesting. Also, when she was commanding the first mission right after the Columbia disaster, I felt like there was a way we could create a dramatic and really human emotional narrative from the book.”
Collins is a naturally shy individual despite her bold achievements in human spaceflight, setting the stage for more women entering NASA’s astronaut program who followed 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 great job, go 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 kids. I had no intention on writing a book. Now this documentary would not have happened without it.” explains Collins. “But then the pandemic hit in 2020 and I had nothing to do other than sit around and Skype meetings. Over the years I’d been approached by my co-author Jonathan Ward and I finally called him in April of 2020 and said, ‘Okay, let’s write the book.’
Even after having published her book, Collins was reluctant to step further into the spotlight 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 on space and aviation,” Collins recalls. “And I told him, ‘No, I didn’t want my life up there on the big screen.’ A couple months went by and I changed my mind, knowing this was going to be a big deal. There was going to be a lot of work and I had to decide how much of my personal life do I want to put out there.”
She first met director Hannah Berryman in her home town of Elmira, New York on the front porch of her father’s old house. Once she’d made the commitment to the project, she was in.
“I don’t make a decision and do something half-way. I think we had a great team,” Collins recalls. “Everybody got along and we just worked fabulous together.”
One of her first milestones seen in the documentary came aboard Discovery in 1995 on STS-63 when she assumed piloting duties under Commander Jim Weatherbee to make history. It might have been an anxiety-inducing moment, but Collins was totally 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’ve been flying since I was 20 years old. To 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 woman commander of a U.S. 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 all about staying focused on what you’re doing and not thinking about who’s watching me” explains Collins. “Both of my shuttle landings were at night. I will say it’s a lot 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 down all the distinguished dates in Collins’s time with NASA required Berryman to focus in on composing the material to present it for maximum emotional resonance with audiences.
“One of the challenges with any sort of story like this is you need to be slightly on the edge of their seats, even though they can see Eileen in front of them and know that she’s okay,” Berryman adds. “You want to be in those missions in the moment of it, feeling like you’ve still got that jeopardy like any film. And also the balancing act between the family story and the mission stories. If you do a film about someone who’s done some great things and you just did that, that’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 makes everything in end even more impressive.
“It was really important to keep that human fallibility that they’re all just a family going through this. Then when you feel the resolution you really care. I was pleased when we had cinema screenings in the UK in the autumn because people seemed to be very moved and thought Eileen was amazing. You’re more amazing as a real person than if you’re some cypher of wonderfulness. If you’ve had challenges in life like the rest of us that makes it even more moving and impressive.”
Encapsulating one’s lifetime and career in under two hours might seem like a daunting task for the creative team, and also for Collins, as she strolled down memory lane during the production. “Spacewoman” employs a variety of intimate scenes curated from archival mission footage, TV shows and news appearances, and an old VHS camcorder.
“My husband Pat and I gave Hannah and her team all of 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 to look back at the videos. I just watched the film again on Friday night. We showed it in 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 huge 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 don’t ever pull those video 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 to be a shuttle commander is to be a parent. Because you have to know how to say no.”
“Spacewoman” launches on its theatrical engagement on March 20, 2026.
