Born May 26, 1951,
Encino, California
Sally Ride never dreamed she would be the first American woman to fly in space. Her career as an astronaut began in 1977, when she answered a newspaper ad placed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was soliciting applications from young scientists to serve as “mission specialists” on future space flights. After a long process of evaluation, Ride was accepted into the space program, which had previously recruited only male military test pilots.
Ride was not the first woman in space, however. A Russian woman, Valentina Tereshkova (see entry), had accompanied a team of astronauts as early as 1963; a second Russian, Svetlana Savitskaya, flew one year before Ride in 1982. But when Ride’s mission was successfully accomplished, she became one of the most respected women in the world and a symbol of hope and progress for American women. Since her historic flight in 1983, a number of other women have proven themselves on U.S. space shuttle missions.
Sally Kristen Ride was born in Encino, California, on May 26, 1951. Her father, a professor of political science at a local community college, described the atmosphere in their home as one of kind encouragement. Her mother volunteered as a counselor at a women’s correctional institution, and her sister became a Presbyterian minister. The only pressure the Rides put on their children was to do their best.
A gifted athlete, Ride spent much of her early childhood playing baseball and football with neighborhood boys. When she turned her attention to tennis at the age of ten, her natural ability and competitive spirit soon earned her a place on the U.S. junior tennis circuit. She was also awarded a partial scholarship to the Westlake School in Los Angeles. Ride found a mentor in one of her favorite teachers, Dr. Elizabeth Mommaerts, whose interest in science inspired Ride to become an excellent student.
During the next few years, Ride was torn between science and tennis, and for a brief period tennis won. Although in 1968 she enrolled at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania to study physics, she left after only three semesters to try to become a tennis professional. In spite of concerted effort, however, she decided she would never be good enough to become a top-ranked player. Ride put tennis behind her and in 1970 returned to college at Stanford University in California. She took a double major in physics and English literature, specializing in the works of William Shakespeare. She enjoyed Shakespeare so much she considered pursuing this interest in graduate school; instead, she settled on astrophysics, studying such lofty subjects as X-ray astronomy and free-election lasers.
In 1977 Ride was among the 8,000 people who applied for the job of mission specialist with the NASA space program. Because of her excellent qualifications, she was one of 208 finalists. NASA’s decision to accept women was a direct result of a shift in emphasis in the multi-billion-dollar space shuttle program. In an effort to become more cost-effective, NASA began to develop projects for private industry. When carrying out complex experiments for paying customers, the skills of scientists and technicians became just as important as the expertise of the pilots. After Ride underwent psychiatric evaluations, physical tests, and several personal interviews, she was one of five women accepted in the astronaut class of 1978. Among the women were a surgeon, a biochemist, a geologist, a physicist, and an electrical engineer.
Ride underwent an intensive yearlong training program that included parachute jumping, water survival, adaption to gravitational pull and weightlessness, and radio communications and navigation. She enjoyed earning her pilot’s license so much that flying became a favorite hobby. All of the recruits flew hundreds of hours in facsimile spacecraft, or “simulators.” Ride was assigned to a team that designed a remote mechanical arm to be used in deploying and retrieving space satellites. This arm proved to be invaluable in subsequent shuttle missions. During the second and third flights of the space shuttle Columbia (in November 1981 and March 1982), Ride served as the ground-based communications officer who radioed messages back and forth between the shuttle crew. She was valued for her practical approach to problem solving and her ability to work well with a team.
Ride’s opportunity finally came in March 1982, when Commander Robert Crippen announced that she had been chosen as one of the crew members of the space shuttle Challenger. Although Crippen insisted she had not been chosen because she was a woman and even though Ride herself downplayed the importance of this issue, feminists celebrated her participation in the flight as a victory for women. Shortly after she was chosen for the program, she married a fellow astronaut.
Following several months of intensive training, the seventh space shuttle flight, with Ride on board, lifted off at 7:00 a.m., June 18, 1983, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Turning out to cheer her on were several hundred thousand spectators, many wearing T-shirts on which “Ride, Sally Ride” was printed. When Challenger achieved Earth orbit, Ride’s duties were to deploy two communications satellites, conduct trials of the mechanical arm she had helped design, and perform and monitor about 40 scientific experiments.
Ride launched Anik-C, a Canadian communications satellite, on the first day of the flight. The next day she successfully deployed Palapa B, an Indonesian communications satellite that provided telephone signals to one million people in Southeast Asia. The mission specialists carried out several tests designed by NASA researchers to determine the feasibility of performing certain industrial manufacturing processes in zero gravity. The most important test was an unqualified success—the deployment and recapture of a self-contained 3,300-pound space laboratory built in West Germany. The scientists needed to know if the shuttle could retrieve malfunctioning satellites, make onboard repairs, and return them to orbit.
Challenger landed on June 24, 1983, at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In a postflight press conference, an elated Ride said, “the thing I’ll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In fact, I’m sure it was the most fun that I’ll ever have in my life.” After three weeks of debriefings, Ride took another assignment at NASA—acting as liaison officer between NASA and private companies doing work on the space program. In October 1983 she flew her last mission on the Challenger. Nearly three years later, on January 28, 1986, the Challenger exploded upon takeoff, killing all crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian to fly in the space shuttle. Ride continues to be a spokesperson for U.S. space efforts.
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