Sally Ride
1951 – 2012 · United States
Known for: Physicist and astronaut, the first American woman to fly in space
“The first American woman in space, who spent the rest of her life holding the door open behind her.”
Biography
Sally Ride was born in Santa Monica, California, on May 26, 1951, the elder daughter of a political science professor and of a mother who counselled women in prison. She grew up in the San Fernando Valley, picked up a tennis racket on a family year in Europe and proved unusually good with it: at ten she was coached by the former world number one Alice Marble. A physiology teacher at the Westlake School for Girls turned her toward science, and she decided at school to become an astrophysicist. Tennis carried her to Swarthmore College and briefly toward a professional career, until a hard morning of matches persuaded her against eight hours of daily practice. She finished at Stanford instead, taking degrees in physics and English literature in 1973 and a doctorate in 1978 on the way X-rays interact with the interstellar medium.
In her last graduate year Ride read that NASA was recruiting scientists, applied, and in 1978 was chosen for Astronaut Group 8, the first American class to include women. She trained as a mission specialist, worked as capsule communicator for the second and third shuttle flights, and helped develop the shuttle's robotic arm, which would shape her own time in orbit. In June 1983 she launched aboard Challenger on STS-7 as the first American woman and the third woman in space, and at 32 the youngest American to have flown. The crew released two communications satellites, and Ride worked the arm to set the SPAS-1 pallet loose and catch it again, the first payload both deployed and recovered that way. She flew Challenger again on STS-41-G in 1984 and logged more than 343 hours in space.
Ride served on the presidential commission that investigated the loss of Challenger in 1986, left NASA the following year, and after two years at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control moved to the University of California, San Diego, to teach physics and work on nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. In 2003 she joined the board investigating the loss of Columbia, the only person to sit on both inquiries. She wrote science books for children and founded a company that carried science into classrooms, aimed at girls being quietly told the subject was not theirs. Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012, at the age of 61. Her obituary named Tam O'Shaughnessy as her partner of twenty seven years, making her the first astronaut publicly known to have been gay.