San Antonio’s Eileen Collins, the subject of the new documentary Spacewoman, was in fourth grade when she read a Junior Scholastic magazine article about astronauts in the U.S. Gemini space program. “I wanted to be just like them. I know there were no women astronauts in those days. It didn't ma tter. I wanted to be a lady astronaut,” Collins recalls.Collins discovered her love of flying as a teenager, inspired by the women pilots she read about at the library.“My mother took us to the library all the time,” she says. “I started checking out books on pilots and flying. I read about pilots like Amelia Earhart and the women that did the Powder Puff Derby in the 1920s. There were women like Louise Thaden and Ruth Law. They're not household names, but I would read about them.”After high school, Collins wanted to enlist in the Air Force, but her father pushed back. She instead earned a mathematics degree at a New York community college before transferring to Syracuse University. But when the Air Force opened its cockpits to women in 1975, everything changed. Collins was among the first women in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps to be accepted for pilot training. ...read more read less