Florida ? Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a space shuttle mission, is leaving the astronaut corps, NASA announced Monday in Cape Canaveral.

Collins, 49, who commanded last year’s mission to the International Space Station, the first shuttle flight since the Columbia tragedy in 2003, plans to pursue private interests and spend more time with her family, the space agency said.

Collins is a veteran of four shuttle flights. She was the first woman to pilot a shuttle craft when she took the controls of Discovery in February 1995 for the first shuttle mission to rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir.

In July 1999, she commanded the shuttle Columbia on its mission to launch the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Her last flight was as commander of Discovery in July and August 2005, a 14-day mission plagued by a series of mishaps, the most serious of which was the loss of insulating foam from the shuttle’s external fuel tank during launch.