School. She knew one other member of the group well: Susan Helms had been a fellow assistant professor at the Air Force Academy and graduate student at Stanford. Pilot ASCANs honed their skills flying the T-38, an aircraft with which Collins was already familiar. They attended classes on the Space Shuttle and its systems, and trained in a low-fidelity simulator. Land survival training was conducted at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington, water survival training at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida, and parachute training at Vance Air Force Base. Although their training was intended to take a year, the ASCANs were moved on to operational roles after nine months. Collins was assigned to orbiter systems, with particular responsibility for the auxiliary power units. After nine months in this assignment, Collins was sent to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida as an astronaut support person (ASP), also known as a Cape Crusader. This was another routine assignment that astronauts did to familiarize them with the Space Shuttle's systems and procedures. ASPs handled the checkout of the systems in the hangar and on the launch pad. As members of the KSC closeout crew, they strapped the astronauts into their seats before takeoff, and helped them out again after landing. Collins spent sixteen months as an ASP, assisting with ten Space Shuttle missions between February 1992 and June 1993. After so long away from JSC, her skills in the simulator had become rusty, so the Chief of the Astronaut Office, Hoot Gibson, returned her to JSC for duty as a capsule communicator (CAPCOM). STS-63 Collins first flew the Space Shuttle as pilot in 1995 aboard STS-63. This was the first time a woman had piloted the Space Shuttle. Delays in the flight schedule meant that she was the second-last member of her class to fly in space. Two more women pilots joined the Astronaut Corps in 1995 with NASA Astronaut Group 15: Pamela Melroy and Susan Still. They would be the only other women to pilot the Space Shuttle in its thirty-year history. The STS-63 mission involved a space rendezvous between the and the Russian space station Mir. This was the first time a Space Shuttle made an approach and flyaround of Mir, although it did not dock. The crew included a cosmonaut, Vladimir Georgiyevich Titov, who had lived on Mir for a year. He became the second cosmonaut to fly