Pamela Melroy, a 46-year-old retired US Air Force colonel, was in the commander's seat when shuttle Discovery blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Tuesday.

She is only the second woman in the shuttle program's 26-year history to command the spacecraft, which is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Thursday for the most complex construction mission yet on the orbiting laboratory.

When latches open between the two crafts, Melroy and her six fellow shuttle astronauts will be greeted by an ISS crew led by another American, Peggy Whitson, a 47-year-old scientist and the first woman in charge of the station.

But this historic first, which was not planned, does not reflect the overall reality of the US space program, where women remain a minority and male culture predominates.

Melroy and Whitson are among 18 women of the astronaut corps at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, along with 73 men.

That means that women make up less than 20 percent of the astronaut corps, according to figures made available by NASA.

After the retirement in May 2006 of Eileen Collins, the first woman shuttle commander, Melroy is the only woman qualified for the task.

"It would be nice to have more female shuttle chiefs," said Duane Ross, the man in charge of astronaut selection at NASA. But few women with the right resume have applied.

To become a shuttle pilots and subsequently commander, a candidate must log at least 1,000 hours flight time on military aircraft.

Only a handful of women in the United States and probably the entire world meet the requirement.

Melroy herself revealed in a recent interview with USA Today newspaper that fewer than five women graduate each year from Air Force schools that train test pilots.

The commander of a one-billion-dollar shuttle must be able execute two of the most delicate maneuvers in piloting: dock the orbiter with the ISS 340 kilometers (211 miles) above Earth and land the 100-tonne spacecraft after the mission is complete.

Most other astronauts at NASA are mission specialists and have a scientific background.

Another woman, Barbara Morgan, 55, broke new ground in August when she became the first teacher to successfully fly on a space shuttle mission.

Morgan, who taught elementary school for a long time before becoming a professional astronaut, was the understudy of Christa McAuliffe, a fellow teacher who was killed in the shuttle Challenger explosion of January 1986.

Even though the United States has tried to promote women in space for the last 30 years, the first woman to go into orbit was a Russian, Valentina Tereshkova, on June 16, 1963.

It took 20 years after the cosmonaut's flight for NASA to catch up -- Sally Ride flew aboard a space shuttle in 1983.

Altogether 46 women from around the world have been in space in the 50-year history of space exploration.

Five of them participated in Soviet and then Russians programs, including Claudie Haignere, the first French woman to fly into space in 1996.

At NASA, 41 women participated in space missions, most of them American with the exception of Julie Payette, the first Canadian woman to go up in space.

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