SALLY RIDE, THE FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN IN SPACE

Sally Ride

Sally Kristen Ride (1951-2012) was an American physicist and astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American woman in space in 1983. 

Ride was the third woman in space overall, after USSR cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982). 

Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32. After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987. She worked for two years at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, the only person to participate in both.

More information: Sally Ride Science

Ride attended Swarthmore College for three semesters, took physics courses at University of California, Los Angeles, and then entered Stanford University as a junior, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English and physics. At Stanford, she earned a master's degree in 1975 and a PhD in physics in 1978 while doing research on the interaction of X-rays with the interstellar medium. Astrophysics and free electron lasers were her specific areas of study.

Sally Ride

Ride was one of 8,000 people who answered an advertisement in the Stanford student newspaper seeking applicants for the space program. 

She was chosen to join NASA in 1978. 

During her career, Ride served as the ground-based capsule communicator, CapCom, for the second and third space shuttle flights (STS-2 and STS-3) and helped develop the space shuttle's Canadarm robot arm.

On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on space shuttle Challenger for STS-7. The five-person crew of the STS-7 mission deployed two communications satellites and conducted pharmaceutical experiments. Ride was the first woman to use the robot arm in space and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.

More information: NASA

Her second space flight was in 1984, also on board the Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. Ride had completed eight months of training for her third flight when the space shuttle Challenger disaster occurred. She was named to the Rogers Commission and headed its subcommittee on operations. Following the investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she led NASA's first strategic planning effort, authored a report titled NASA Leadership and America's Future in Space and founded NASA's Office of Exploration. 

Sally Ride visiting Sesame Street in 1984.

According to Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned of the technical problems that led to the Challenger disaster, after the entire workforce of Morton-Thiokol shunned him Ride was the only public figure to show support for him when he went public with his pre-disaster warnings. Sally Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for his efforts.

Ride wrote or co-wrote seven books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.

Ride was a member of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, an independent review requested by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on May 7, 2009.

After Sally Ride's death in 2012, General Donald Kutyna revealed that she had discreetly provided him with key information about O-rings that eventually led to identification of the cause of the explosion.

Download Sally Ride's Report Leadership and America's Future in Space

Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. 

Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions 

and coming up with a method. It's delving in. 

Sally Ride