Who became the first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission?

Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission.

Collins achieved that milestone as commander of STS-93, which launched aboard Columbia in July 1999. The mission deployed the Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of NASA’s major space-based astronomy projects. Collins had already become the first woman to pilot a Shuttle on STS-63 in 1995, a flight that performed a rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir.

Her achievement is sometimes confused with the first woman to pilot a Shuttle, which was also Collins, or with the first woman to command any spacecraft. Collins was the first woman to command a U.S. space mission, while women had previously held other important command roles in aviation and space operations. She later commanded STS-114 in 2005, NASA’s return-to-flight mission after the Columbia disaster.