She's appeared on TV, been featured in hundreds of articles, and has more than 20,000 links to her name on the Internet.
Now Collins, 42, is back at her old job, with no pay, 24-hour responsibilities and a title shared with millions of women: Mommy.
"My daughter just thinks that all moms fly the space shuttle," said Collins.
While Collins was in orbit overseeing the release of a $1.6-billion X-ray telescope, her husband took off work to care for their 3-year-old daughter, Bridget.
She misses her mom, Pat Youngs told his wife during the flight. "She's had enough time with Dad."
Youngs, a Delta Air Lines pilot, and Collins met at Travis Air Force Base in California where they were both flight instructors. It was Collins' second assignment following her 1979 graduation from Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training.
Collins grew up in Elmira, NY, fascinated with the idea of flying. She remembers watching gliders at the nearby National Soaring Museum for hours at a time.
"I always thought that someday I wanted to do that," she said.
Her parents didn't have money for flying lessons, so Collins tucked away her dream and buckled into work. When she was 17, she spent her savings from sales jobs on private flying lessons.
She attended a community college, then transferred to Syracuse University and joined the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps. Graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1978, Collins set her sights on becoming an astronaut. After 30 years of flying men, NASA had just opened its elite astronaut corps to women. Five women -- Shannon Lucid, Anna Fisher, Judy Resnik, Rhea Seddon and Sally Ride - were selected to become astronauts that year.
Collins went to Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma for pilot training, then began teaching others how to fly T-38 performance jets. She, along with all other females, were not allowed to fly combat jets.
"I knew it was going to be an evolutionary process," Collins said before her flight. "If our generation of women did our jobs, did them good, did them right, really stayed professional with everything we did, then eventually those opportunities would open."
Collins made sure she would be ready. After three years flying T-38 jets, she became an instructor pilot for the military's four-engine C-141 cargo planes and gradually built up enough hours to earn an airlift command.
She also went back to school for graduate degrees from Stanford and Webster universities and later taught mathematics at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Collins then was selected to attend the prestigious Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. By the time she graduated in 1990, she had amassed more than 5,000 hours on 30 different types of aircraft.
NASA took notice. In 1989, Collins applied to become an astronaut, either as a mission specialist or a pilot. No women had yet qualified to fly the shuttle.
"I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to be part of bringing those barriers down," she said. "I'm honored to be the first woman to have an opportunity to command the shuttle."
Collins flew twice as the shuttle pilot before NASA selected her to command the five-day mission to carry the Chandra X-ray Observatory in orbit.
"In many ways I wish that a woman could have done this job at some point in the past," Collins said Thursday. "I feel like it's long overdue."
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