Spacewoman 
Directed by Hannah Berryman 
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes 
DOC NYC World Premiere - Saturday, November 16 at the IFC Center
Other times and online options here

by Jill Vranken, Staff Writer 

“So Eileen, what makes a good astronaut?” 

Eileen Collins takes a breath, tilts her head to camera. It is a question she is uniquely placed to answer. A retired NASA astronaut and United States Air Force colonel, Collins was the first woman to command and pilot the Space Shuttle. Over the course of Spacewoman’s hour and a half (and change) run time, documentary maker Hannah Berryman deftly charts Collins’s beginnings–from a shy girl growing up in Elmira, New York and dealing with her parents’ separation when she was young, to navigating poverty in the wake of Hurricane Agnes–through to her career as a pioneer at NASA. 

She does so with a mix of present day interviews (aside from Collins herself, we hear from a number of her former colleagues as well as her husband and children) and an impressive amount of archival footage, which allows us to fully immerse ourselves in Collins’s story and get access to the four missions that make up the cornerstones of her time as an astronaut. 

While the relatively short running time does mean that Berryman has to speedrun a lot of Collins’s early career in the Air Force to focus on those four Space Shuttle missions, she manages to both give us that in depth access and explore the emotional side of the coin with Collins’s family. Her daughter, Bridget, was born nine months after Collins returned from her first mission (the STS-63 mission, aka the “Near-Mir” mission, the first rendezvous between the American Space Shuttle and the Russian space station Mir). She talks candidly about growing up with a mother who had an extraordinary job, and about the strain in their relationship as she grew to understand that it was also a very dangerous job. 

The most affecting moment in the documentary is when Collins recounts the moment she had to sit down with young Bridget and talk to her about what happened to the Challenger in 1986. After reassuring her that steps had since been taken to make sure such a disaster never happened again, she then goes on to say that just two weeks later the disaster with Space Shuttle Columbia happened. 

It’s a uniquely terrible situation to find yourself in, knowing that you have to prepare your child (Collins later had a son named Luke, who we briefly see speaking to Bridget - he explains that he was still very young when his mother’s last missions took place, and therefore wasn’t able to make the sort of connections in his head that Bridget did) for a situation like this. There is footage of the Challenger explosion, and the cuts to the spectators, family and friends among them, are heartbreaking in a way we may never fully understand. Bridget’s perspective brings a new, very human dimension to Collins’s story.

Berryman also manages to make the movie into a proper nailbiter when it comes to the missions themselves, especially Collins’s final mission (STS-114) which comes precariously close to going wrong. And while I would very much like to explain to you what exactly happened, I know next to nothing about space flight so I’ll keep it brief and say that the issues were similar to the ones faced by Columbia. 

Overall, while Spacewoman does race to get to the meat of Collins’s story, it does not lose humanity and getting to spend time listening to Collins as she talks about things like having little chocolate shuttles as a gift for the cosmonauts on board Mir, or seeing her first sunrise from above the Earth is delightful. Berryman asks the question of what level of risk is acceptable in human endeavor. And the answer this film gives is that if you are part of something that’s bigger than yourself, that goes beyond what you even dream of being possible, then you are willing to risk a whole lot. 

Collins does answer Berryman’s question of what makes a good astronaut. As per the woman herself: “I would say a person who is not prone to panicking. An astronaut is a person who does not fear problems but yet sees problems as challenges, and something that’s frankly exciting.”