Giant leap looming for womankind

What’s more, Melroy is the only female shuttle pilot left at NASA. Eileen Collins, who in 1999 became the first woman to command a shuttle, quit NASA last year. Susan Kilrain, who flew as a shuttle pilot but never as a commander, resigned in 2002. Both have children.

Melroy and Whitson are married to scientists, and neither has children.

The countdown started Saturday for Discovery’s launch. There was concern about rain on Tuesday morning, but meteorologists put the odds of acceptable weather at liftoff time at 60 percent. No major technical problems were being tracked.

This will be Melroy’s third shuttle flight; her first two were as co-pilot. She became an astronaut in 1995, Whitson in 1996.

Their 1½ weeks together in orbit will be extraordinarily busy and the work exceedingly complex. The shuttle is hauling up a pressurized compartment that will provide docking ports for the European and Japanese laboratories that will be launched over the next few months.

The 10 space fliers, seven of them men, will attach the new compartment, named Harmony, to the space station and move a girder and set of solar wings from one spot to another. Five spacewalks will be conducted, including one to test a repair technique on deliberately damaged shuttle thermal tiles.

Melroy and Whitson will oversee it all.

Their male crewmates offer plenty of praise. One of them — Daniel Tani — will report to both. He’ll fly up on Discovery and swap places with an astronaut who has been living on the space station since June, and stay on board until another shuttle comes up in December.

“The joke has been that my life recently is run by women,” said Tani, who is married with two young daughters. “I have two bosses at work. I’ve got three bosses at home and as it was pointed out recently, much of the time when we’re running the robotic arm, I’m the assistant to Stephanie” Wilson, a shuttle crew member.

“So far, I’ve survived all of it so we’ll see if I can get through the next couple months,” he said with a laugh.

It’s more of a novelty for Melroy’s co-pilot, Marine Col. George Zamka. He never served with or for a woman in any of his military flying units.

“I understand it’s a wonderful thing for young women to see Pam flying, but in terms of her, I look at her as an individual with some tremendous skills,” Zamka said.

Melroy and Whitson said they don’t know of any men — American or Russian — who would refuse to serve on their crews. It wasn’t always that way at NASA, which didn’t accept women as astronauts until 1978.

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