The Story of

Sally Ride

Sally Kristen Ride was the first American woman who shattered the “space” ceiling. She was born on May 26th, 1951 in Encino, part of Los Angeles. From a young age, Sally Ride gravitated towards science and math and had an active interest in sports.

She received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English in 1973, a master’s degree in physics in 1975 and a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1978, all from Stanford. Her graduate work involved X-ray astronomy and free-electron lasers.

Ride was finishing up her doctorate at Stanford when she saw an ad in the school paper inviting women to apply for NASA mission specialist positions and decided to go for it.

Ride was finishing up her doctorate at Stanford when she saw an ad in the school paper inviting women to apply for NASA mission specialist positions and decided to go for it. Known as “the 35 New Guys,” this historic group included five other women, along with NASA’s first African American and Asian American astronauts.

In her early days at NASA, Dr. Ride trained in a range of things from parachute jumping to weightlessness and the huge G-forces of a rocket launch. She learned to fly a jet plane, switched from physics to engineering and helped in the development of a robotic arm for the space shuttle, her expertise with the latter ultimately leading her to be a part of the 1983 mission. She was part of a crew of five that spent about six days in space, during which she used the arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite.

Being the first American woman to be chosen to go into space, Ride underwent substantial media scrutiny. She spoke of how everyone wanted to know if she would wear makeup in space, how she would manage menstruation or if the mission would affect her reproductive health, “ The worst question without a doubt was if I cried when we had malfunctions in the simulator.”

On “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson joked that the shuttle flight would be delayed because Dr. Ride had to find a purse to match her shoes. She responded to the sexism saying, “It’s too bad this is such a big deal. It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.”

On June 18, 1983, at the age of 32, Sally Ride made history as a mission specialist on STS-7, NASA's seventh shuttle mission, becoming both the youngest American and the first American woman to fly into space, as “ Millions of little girls [sat] by their television sets and [saw that they could] be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.”

She also became the first American woman to travel to space a second time when she launched on another Challenger mission, STS-41-G, on Oct. 5, 1984. Ride was assigned to a third shuttle mission, but her crew's training was cut short by the Challenger disaster in January 1986.

In 1987, Dr. Ride led a study team that wrote a report advising NASA on the future direction of the space program. The team recommended an outpost on the Moon, though not a “race to Mars.” But Mars should still be the “ultimate objective,” the group said. In the report, Dr. Ride wrote that a lunar outpost would combine “adventure, science, technology and perhaps the seeds of enterprise.”

In the same year, Dr. Ride retired from NASA and became a science fellow at the Centre for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford. In 1989, she became a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute at the University of California, San Diego.

Ride developed a passion for trying to interest young people, especially girls, in science, math and technology. She also wrote five science-related children's books: ‘To Space and Back’, ‘Voyager’, ‘The Third Planet’, ‘The Mystery of Mars’, and ‘Exploring Our Solar System’, going further on to start a company in 2001, Sally Ride Science, to “make science and engineering cool again,” as she put it, by providing science-oriented school programs, materials and teacher training. In 2003, Dr. Ride was added to the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

"All adventures, specially into new territory, are scary."

Ride died on July 23, 2012, Monday, at the age of 61 following a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. In a statement commemorating the extraordinary woman, President Obama said “Dr. Ride had been a national hero and a powerful role model. She inspired generations of young girls to reach for the stars and later fought tirelessly to help them get there by advocating for a greater focus on science and math in our schools. Sally’s life showed us that there are no limits to what we can achieve.”