Eileen Collins will lead the Discovery shuttle as it blasts into space in July. NASA's first female shuttle commander remains among the few pioneering women in the male-dominated field. Collins became the first female shuttle commander in a 1999 mission, and she will resume that role in the fleet's first mission since February 2003, when the Columbia shuttle disaster left seven astronauts dead, killed as the shuttle exploded during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, created in 1958, first sent a woman into space in 1983, when Sally Ride rode in the Challenger shuttle. The American astronaut Shannon Lucid was the first woman to spend time in a space station, when she visited MIR in March 1996. Lucid remains the only woman to have been awarded with the Congressional Space Medal of Honour.

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