Sally Ride

American astronaut

• Born: May 26, 1951
• Birthplace: Encino, California
• Died: July 23, 2012

NASA astronaut Ride was the first American woman to fly in space when she flew aboard space shuttle Challenger in 1983 as a mission specialist. She was one of the first of a new breed of astronauts who were primarily scientists, and who were called mission specialists. Ride later founded NASA’s Office of Exploration.

Early Life

Sally Ride was born in Encino, a suburb of the city of Los Angeles, on May 26, 1951. She was the older of two daughters born to Joyce Ride and Dale B. Ride, a member of the faculty at Santa Monica City College. Ride’s parents were active as elders in their Presbyterian church, and Joyce often volunteered her time as an English tutor to students from outside the United States and as a counselor at a women’s prison.

Ride’s parents encouraged her competitive spirit in academics and in athletics. She was a born athlete and often played the rough-and-tumble games of football and baseball with the neighborhood boys. Ride began playing tennis, a less hazardous sport, at the request of her mother. Under the tutelage of tennis great Alice Marble, Ride quickly excelled in this sport and became proficient enough to rank eighteenth nationally. Her excellence in tennis earned her a partial scholarship to Westlake School for Girls (now Harvard-Westlake School), a private preparatory school in Los Angeles. At the preparatory school, Sally became interested in the study of physics through the influence of her science teacher, Elizabeth Mommaerts, and, for the next five years, science and tennis competed for Ride’s time and attention.

In 1968, Ride enrolled at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania as a physics major, but left after three terms to concentrate on her tennis game after winning a national collegiate tennis tournament. Although she was a top-ranked college player, she realized that she did not have the talent to advance to professional tennis. Ride returned to college in 1970 and completed a double major in English literature and physics at Stanford University in California in 1973. After graduation, she briefly considered studying Shakespeare in graduate school but settled on astrophysics to further her dream of working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

Life’s Work

Ride began her path to fame while completing work on her doctoral dissertation at Stanford with research into free-electron laser physics. One day she read an announcement in the campus newspaper indicating that NASA was seeking young scientists to serve as mission specialists. Acting on impulse, she applied to join the astronaut program, which had lifted its long-standing policy against women astronauts to attract additional qualified scientists willing to forgo high salaries and work on the new space shuttle program. To Ride’s surprise, she made it through the preliminary screening process to become one of the finalists. In 1977, she was flown to the Johnson Space Center outside Houston, Texas, for exhausting interviews and fitness and psychiatric evaluation tests. After three months of rigorous testing, Ride officially became an astronaut. In 1978, shortly after earning her PhD, she reported to the Johnson Space Center to begin the intensive training required of NASA mission specialists.

In the first year of training, Ride learned parachute jumping and water survival techniques, the latter for the possibility that the shuttle might have to be aborted into the ocean. She also acclimated to increased gravity forces, the force encountered during acceleration and deceleration back to Earth, as well as to weightlessness. She had courses in radio communication and navigation and learned to fly a jet. Piloting a jet proved to be an enjoyable experience for Ride, and she eventually acquired a pilot’s license. From 1982 until 1987 she was married to fellow astronaut Steven Hawley.

Throughout Ride’s preparation time, NASA maintained its bureaucratic composure regarding its inclusion of women in the space shuttle program. Indeed, team player that she was, Ride insisted that her participation in the flight was “no big deal.” Whether she liked it or not, news of her flight brought her instant celebrity. Newspapers and television reporters interviewed her again and again, and US president Ronald Reagan gave her extra attention at a White House luncheon. Composer Casse Culver wrote and recorded the song “Ride, Sally, Ride,” and T-shirts urged the same.

Ride was asked to join the shuttle program by US Navy captain Robert L. Crippen, a veteran astronaut who had piloted the first shuttle mission in 1981. Crippen said, of his choice of Ride, that “she is flying with us because she is the very best person for the job. There is no man I would rather have in her place.” Ride, in her unassuming manner, simply stated that she had not become an astronaut to become “a historic figure,” and that she believed it was “time that people realized that women in this country can do any job that they want to do.” Ride’s special virtue was that she was so much like the male astronauts and so utterly and convincingly their equal. She was just as determined, just as disciplined, just as fearless, and just as predictable.

On June 18, 1983, Ride blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aboard space shuttle Challenger (STS-7) as one of five crew members. On board, she had general mission duties in addition to performing her scientific work. She was chosen to sit behind mission commander Crippen and copilot Frederick Hauck to act as flight engineer during takeoff and landing. During the ninety-six orbits, she and her fellow mission specialist, John Fabian, worked in weightless conditions with the complex Canadarm, a fifty-foot remote “arm” used to move payloads in and out of the shuttle cargo bay. Ride and Fabian trained for two years on the ground with the computerized arm and became experts in its operation. Another task on the mission was to start Anik-C, a Canadian domestic communications satellite, on its way to a geosynchronous orbit hovering above Earth’s equator. This satellite was designed to handle thirty-two color television channels. A second communications satellite, named Palapa-B and owned by the Indonesian government, was launched into orbit to carry voice, video, and telephone signals to Southeast Asia.

Forty other experiments were conducted by the Challenger crew. These included studies of metal alloy manufacture, solar cell testing, growth of semiconductor crystals, and glass production. One experiment, devised by high school students, was a project sending 150 carpenter ants into orbit in the shuttle cargo bay to see how weightlessness affected their social structure. The California Institute of Technology sent an experiment in which radish seedlings were subjected to simulated gravity to find the right gravitational force for best growth. Purdue University’s experiment investigated how sunflower seeds germinated in zero gravity. The highlight of the mission was the deployment of a huge free-floating satellite to document its position with the first in-space color photographs before recapturing it. The satellite was then released again and snared once more. The crew repeated this procedure for nine and one-half hours before Ride captured the satellite for the last time and stowed it in the cargo bay for the trip home. Challenger landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on June 24.

Sally’s ride (a pun often used by the media) marked major changes in the United States manned space program. Much of the daredevil aspect was now gone from space travel. The object of the space program was not simply getting into orbit but working there. In fact, Ride had recommended to NASA administrator James Fletcher that space be used to study planet Earth.

Two Soviet women had preceded Ride into space, but their feats did not leave a lasting mark on the American public consciousness. In 1963, in the early days of piloted spaceflight, twenty-six-year-old textile mill worker and amateur skydiver Valentina Tereshkova was put on a rocket by the Soviet Union in what the US media of the day generally dismissed as a publicity stunt. In August of 1982, the Soviets launched into space the second woman cosmonaut, thirty-four-year-old test pilot Svetlana Savitskaya. Her presence in space, however, was taken lightly by her colleagues.

Ride went into space a second time aboard the Challenger on October 5, 1984, as part of the seven-person crew of STS-41-G. Again, Crippen was the commander. She was joined by Kathryn D. Sullivan, marking the first time that two women had flown on the same space mission. Before landing on October 13, the crew deployed the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, tested an orbital refueling system, and performed oceanography observations. At the end of the trip Ride had 343 hours in space.

Ride had been training for a third shuttle trip when the Challenger explosion occurred on January 28, 1986. She was named to the presidential commission that investigated the accident and was chair of a subcommittee on operations. She later worked at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, as special assistant to Fletcher for long-range and strategic planning. As part of her research brief, she produced an influential report entitled “Leadership and America’s Future in Space.” She also founded NASA’s Office of Exploration. In 2003 she served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which studied the accident involving space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003.

Ride left NASA in 1987 to be part of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Arms Control. Two years later she moved to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), as a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute. Her research focused on the theory of nonlinear beam-wave interactions.

One of Ride’s principal interests involved encouraging young people to study science. In 1999 she inaugurated and directed EarthKam, a program permitting schoolchildren to take photographs from space and download them to the Web. In 2001, she founded Sally Ride Science, a company dedicated to science education. Her programs encourage girls in the fifth through eighth grades to pursue science, mathematics, and technology. The company sponsores science camps, a national toy-design competition, festivals, and workshops, and provides instruction for teachers, reading packets about individual sciences for public schools, and other publications. Ride also wrote seven science books for children about astronomy and space exploration. Six of those books were cowritten by Sally Ride Science's cofounder, Tam O'Shaughnessy. Ride and O'Shaughnessy became romantically involved in 1985 and remained together until Ride succumbed to pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012. As Ride was a private person, her fight against cancer and her relationship with O'Shaughnessy were both generally unknown to the public until after her death. Ride was the first known LGBT astronaut.

Ride received numerous awards and honors. Among them were the Space Flight Medal (twice), Von Braun Award, Lindbergh Eagle, Jefferson Award for Public Service, Theodore Roosevelt Award (the highest honor bestowed by the National Collegiate Athletics Association), and UCSD’s Chancellor’s Associated Recognition Award for Outstanding Community Service. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Astronaut Hall of Fame, International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame, and California Hall of Fame. The Presidential Medal of Freedom was posthumously awarded to Ride in 2013.

Significance

For all the merits of the scientific and experimental aspects of the voyages of the space shuttle Challenger, Ride was the one who provoked the world’s curiosity. Cool, calm, and controlled in all circumstances, Ride hurtled through space aboard the one-hundred-ton white-and-blue shuttle, proving that she was certainly made of “the right stuff.”

Ride’s legacy as an astronaut-scientist also came to signify the ascendancy of the mission specialist over the pilot. The close-knit brotherhood of test and fighter pilots who made up the original astronaut corps was diluted by those having a new kind of skill the ability to do quadratic equations and conduct scientific experiments instead of fancy flying alone. Under these developing guidelines, Ride became the ideal candidate and the ideal NASA astronaut because of her scientific background and because she was able to learn and readily solve new problems.

Being a respected space pioneer was more important to Ride than achieving celebrity as a woman astronaut. Her space shuttle career earned for her the trust and high regard of her colleagues as well as the admiration of an entire nation. Following her work with the space shuttle program she worked to encourage young people, especially girls, to pursue careers in science.

Bibliography

America’s Space Shuttle: Shuttle Mission Reports and Astronaut Biographies, Documents on the Past, Present, and Future of the Shuttle. Mt. Laurel: Progressive Management, 2001. CD-ROM.

"Biographical Data: Sally K. Ride." Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. NASA, July 2012. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Begley, Sharon. “Challenger: Ride, Sally Ride.” Newsweek, June 13, 1983. Print.

Boyle, Alan. "Why Sally Ride Waited until Her Death to Tell the World She Was Gay." NBC News Science. NBCNews.com, 24 July 2012. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Camp, Carole Ann. Sally Ride: First Woman in Space. Springfield: Enslow, 1997. Print.

Fox, Mary Virginia. Women Astronauts: Aboard the Shuttle. Rev. ed. New York: J. Messner, 1987. Print.

Gibson, Karen Bush. Women in Space: 23 Stories of First Flights, Scientific Missions, and Gravity-Breaking Adventures. Chicago: Chicago Review P, 2014. Print.

Golden, Frederic. “Sally’s Joy Ride into the Sky.” Time, June 27, 1983. Print.

Grady, Denise. "American Woman Who Shattered Space Ceiling." New York Times. New York Times, 23 July 2012. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Harland, David M. The Space Shuttle: Roles, Missions, and Accomplishments. New York: Wiley, 1998. Print.

Kevles, Bettyann. Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print.

Macy, Sue. Sally Ride: Life on a Mission. New York: Aladdin, 2014. Print.

Ride, Sally, and Tam O’Shaughnessy. Exploring Our Solar System. New York: Crown, 2003. Print.

Shane, Brian. "Space Pioneer Sally Ride among Presidential Honorees." USA Today. Gannett, 19 Nov. 2013. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Shayler, David, and Ian Moule. Women in Space Following Valentina. New York: Springer, 2005. Print.

Sherr, Lynn. Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space. New York: Simon, 2014. Print.