Sally Ride

Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in Los Angeles, California, the elder of two daughters of Dale Ride, a political science professor, and Joyce Ride, a counselor and volunteer ^[1]. The family lived in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Encino, where Sally grew up reading widely and playing sports with an intensity that set her apart from most of her classmates.

Tennis shaped her adolescence. She ranked among the top junior players in the country and earned a partial scholarship to the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, a private school where a science teacher, Elizabeth Mommaerts, encouraged her interest in the physical sciences ^[1]. For a time Ride considered a professional tennis career. Billie Jean King, who once saw her play, reportedly thought she had the talent for it. Ride chose the laboratory over the court.

After a brief period at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, she returned to California and enrolled at Stanford University. There she pursued an unusual double course of study, graduating in 1973 with bachelor's degrees in both physics and English literature, the latter with a focus on Shakespeare ^[2]. She stayed at Stanford for graduate work, completing a master's degree in 1975 and a PhD in physics in 1978 with research on the interaction of X-rays with the interstellar medium and on free electron lasers ^[2].

The turn that defined the rest of her life came from a newspaper. In 1977 Ride saw an announcement in the Stanford student paper that NASA was recruiting a new class of astronauts, and for the first time the agency was explicitly inviting women to apply ^[1]. She sent in an application along with roughly 8,000 other hopefuls. In January 1978 NASA selected 35 new astronaut candidates for the shuttle program, a group that included six women; Ride was one of them ^[3].

The 1978 class, which its members nicknamed the TFNG group, broke the mold of the all male, mostly test pilot astronaut corps of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo years. Ride trained as a mission specialist, a role created for the shuttle era that emphasized scientific and engineering work over piloting ^[3]. She learned to fly T-38 jets, practiced parachute jumping and water survival, and helped develop the shuttle's robotic arm, the Remote Manipulator System, which would become central to her flight assignments.

Before flying herself, Ride served as a capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, in Mission Control for the second and third shuttle flights in 1981 and 1982, the first woman to hold that position during a mission ^[3]. Her technical fluency and calm on the console impressed flight directors, and in April 1982 NASA announced that she would join the crew of STS-7, making her the first American woman assigned to a spaceflight.

On June 18, 1983, the space shuttle Challenger rose from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-7 with a five person crew commanded by Robert Crippen, and Sally Ride became the first American woman in space ^[3]. Two Soviet cosmonauts, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982, had preceded her, but Ride's flight carried enormous symbolic weight in the United States. Crowds at the launch wore shirts reading "Ride, Sally Ride," borrowing the line from the song "Mustang Sally," and press attention before liftoff was relentless. Reporters asked whether she would cry if things went wrong and how the flight would affect her reproductive organs; Ride answered with dry patience and insisted she was simply an astronaut doing a job ^[4].

During the six day mission the crew deployed two communications satellites and Ride operated the robotic arm to release and then retrieve a free flying research platform, the first time the arm had been used to grab a satellite in orbit ^[3]. The technical success mattered to her far more than the celebrity. She flew again on mission STS-41-G in October 1984, an eight day flight that made her the first American woman to travel to space twice, and she was training for a third mission when the program stopped abruptly ^[3].

On January 28, 1986, Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. President Reagan appointed Ride to the Rogers Commission that investigated the accident, where she served on the panel examining the failed solid rocket booster joint ^[5]. She was, by many accounts, quietly instrumental: fellow commissioner and Air Force general Donald Kutyna later said that Ride discreetly passed him the key data showing that the booster's O-rings lost resilience in cold temperatures, information that eventually reached physicist Richard Feynman and shaped the commission's famous conclusions ^[5]. Seventeen years later NASA asked her to serve on the board investigating the 2003 Columbia accident, making her the only person to sit on both shuttle disaster inquiries ^[3]. In between, she led a 1987 strategic planning study whose published result, widely known as the Ride Report, urged NASA to balance human exploration with a Mission to Planet Earth program of environmental observation ^[5].

Ride guarded her private life with a determination that matched her public composure. In 1982 she married fellow astronaut Steven Hawley; the two divorced in 1987 ^[1]. She gave few personal interviews, declined most offers to trade on her fame, and turned down lucrative endorsements that many first achievers would have accepted.

Her most enduring relationship remained unknown to the public until after her death. For 27 years her partner was Tam O'Shaughnessy, a childhood friend from the junior tennis circuit who became a psychology professor and later her co-author and business partner ^[4]. The relationship was disclosed in the obituary Ride's company released in July 2012, which made her, posthumously, the first known LGBT astronaut. O'Shaughnessy has said Ride kept the relationship private in part because she feared it could harm their educational company's work with schools and corporate sponsors ^[4].

Away from work Ride ran, played tennis, and kept the low key habits of a career scientist. Friends and colleagues described her as intensely private but generous with students, more comfortable explaining orbital mechanics to a classroom than accepting an award before a banquet audience ^[1].

Ride left NASA in 1987 for the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford, where she spent two years working on issues at the intersection of science and national security ^[2]. In 1989 she moved to the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute, positions she used to keep one foot in research while expanding her work in science education ^[6].

Education gradually became her central mission. She wrote or co-wrote several science books for children, beginning with To Space and Back in 1986, most of them with Tam O'Shaughnessy ^[4]. She directed NASA funded outreach projects, including EarthKAM, a program that let middle school students command a camera aboard the space shuttle and later the International Space Station to photograph Earth ^[6].

In 2001 she co-founded Sally Ride Science in San Diego with O'Shaughnessy and three other colleagues. The company ran science festivals for girls, trained teachers, and published classroom materials, all aimed at the age range where research showed girls often drift away from science and mathematics ^[6]. In 2009 she served on the Augustine Committee, the White House panel that reviewed the future of American human spaceflight ^[3]. Ride was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2011 and continued working through her treatment. She died on July 23, 2012, at her home in La Jolla, California, at the age of 61 ^[7].

The honors began in her lifetime and multiplied after it. Ride was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame, and in 2013 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, with O'Shaughnessy accepting on her behalf ^[7]. The Navy named a research vessel R/V Sally Ride in 2014, the first American research ship named for a woman, and in 2022 the United States Mint placed her image on a quarter in its American Women series ^[6]. Schools across the country carry her name.

Her influence runs deeper than the plaques. Among the most repeated Sally Ride facts is one she stated plainly herself: young people cannot easily become what they cannot see. Sally Ride Science, now operated through UC San Diego, continues the festivals and teacher programs she designed, and the generation of American women who flew after her, from Eileen Collins to Peggy Whitson, entered an astronaut corps whose doors her flight helped force open ^[6].

Any Sally Ride biography ends with a double portrait: the astrophysicist who studied X-rays and lasers, and the public figure who absorbed the glare of history so that the women behind her would not have to. Her list of Sally Ride achievements includes two spaceflights, two accident investigations, a shelf of children's books, and a company built on the conviction that curiosity has no gender. That combination, more than any single first, is why her name endures ^[1].