Sally Kristen Ride
NASA astronaut
Nationality	American
Status	Teaching
Born	(1951-05-26) May 26, 1951 (age 61) Encino, Los Angeles, California
Other occupation	Physicist
Time in space	14d 07h 46m
Selection	1978 NASA Group
Missions	STS-7, STS-41-G
Mission insignia
Retirement	August 15, 1987

Sally Kristen Ride (born May 26, 1951) is an American physicist and a former NASA astronaut. Ride joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman—and then-youngest American, at 32—to enter space.^[1] In 1987 she left NASA to work at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Early life[link]

The eldest child of Carol Joyce (née Anderson) and Dale Burdell Ride, Sally was born in Encino, part of Los Angeles, California. Of Norwegian ancestry, she has a sister named Karen "Bearful" Ride, who is a Presbyterian minister. Ride attended Portola Middle School and Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles (now Harvard-Westlake School) on a scholarship. In addition to being interested in science, she was a nationally ranked tennis player. Ride attended Swarthmore College and then transferred to Stanford University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English and physics. Also at Stanford, she earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics, while doing research in astrophysics and free electron laser physics.^[2][3]

NASA career[link]

Sally Ride on Challenger's mid-deck during STS-7.

Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper seeking applicants for the space program.^[4] As a result, she joined 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 robot arm.^[3] On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on Space Shuttle Challenger for STS-7. (She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.) On STS-7, during which the five-person crew 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. Her second space flight was in 1984, also on board the Challenger. She has spent more than a total of 343 hours in space. Ride, who had completed eight months of training for her third flight when the Space Shuttle Challenger accident occurred,^[3] was named to the Presidential Commission investigating the accident, and headed its subcommittee on Operations.^[3] Following the investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, where she led NASA's first strategic planning effort; authored a report entitled "Leadership and America's Future in Space"; and founded NASA's Office of Exploration.^[2] Ride married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982, but the two divorced in 1987.^[5]

After NASA[link]

In 1987, Ride left her position in Washington, DC, to work at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the California Space Institute. In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She is currently on leave from the university, and is the President and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she founded in 2001, that creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls.^[6][7][8]

According to Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned of the technical problems that led to the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, Ms. Ride was the only public figure to show support for him when he went public with his pre-disaster warnings (after the entire workforce of Morton-Thiokol shunned him). Sally Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for his efforts.^[9]

Ride has written or co-written five books on space, aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.^[3][10][11]

Ride endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008.^[12]

Ride is 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.

Awards and honors[link]

Sally Ride communitcates with ground controllers from the flight deck during the six day mission in Challenger, 1983

Ride has received numerous awards, including the National Space Society's von Braun Award, the Lindbergh Eagle, and the NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Award. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame, and has twice been awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal.^[3] Ride is the only person to serve on both of the panels investigating Shuttle accidents (those for the Challenger accident and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster). Two elementary schools in the United States are named after her: Sally K. Ride Elementary School in The Woodlands, Texas, and Sally K. Ride Elementary School in Germantown, Maryland.^[2]

On December 6, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Ride into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.^[13]

Bibliography[link]

See Also[link]

• List of female adventurers

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sally Ride

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Sally Ride

• NASA biography
• Sally Ride Science Festivals
• Sally Ride Girls Science Camps
• Sally Ride Science page, founded 2001
• USA Today Q&A
• Sally Ride on The California Museum's California Legacy Trails