Sally Ride
- In full:
- Sally Kristen Ride
- Born:
- May 26, 1951, Encino, California, U.S.
- Died:
- July 23, 2012, La Jolla, California (aged 61)
- Awards And Honors:
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013)
What was Sally Ride most famous for?
What caused Sally Ride’s death?
Was Sally Ride on the space shuttle Challenger that exploded?
Sally Ride (born May 26, 1951, Encino, California, U.S.—died July 23, 2012, La Jolla, California) was an American astronaut, the first American woman to travel into outer space. Only two other women preceded her: Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982), both from the former Soviet Union.
Early life
Sally Ride showed great early promise as a tennis player. For high school, she attended the Westlake School for Girls (now Harvard-Westlake School) in Los Angeles on a tennis scholarship. She attended Swarthmore College and twice won the Eastern Collegiate Championship in tennis. She left Swarthmore and returned to California to pursue a professional tennis career, but she eventually gave up her plans and attended Stanford University, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in English and physics (1973). She remained at Stanford to receive a masters and a doctoral degree in physics in 1975 and 1978, respectively.
First American woman in space
In 1977, while Sally Ride was a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in laser physics at Stanford, she applied to to be an astronaut at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which for the first time was allowing women to become astronauts. The upcoming space shuttle program required many new astronauts. In 1978, thirty-five astronauts were selected, and Ride was one of six women in the group. She began her training and evaluation courses that same year.
In August 1979 Ride completed her NASA training, obtained a pilot’s license, and became eligible for assignment as a U.S. space shuttle mission specialist. The competition was intense among the six women to be the first to fly in space. Ride was particularly skilled in training with the shuttle’s robotic arm. She was chosen in April 1982 for STS-7, the first mission to carry the new shuttle astronauts.
On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space while rocketing into orbit aboard the shuttle Challenger. The mission lasted six days, during which time she helped deploy two communications satellites with the robotic arm and carry out a variety of experiments.
Ride served on a second space mission, STS-41G, aboard Challenger in October 1984; the crew included another woman, Kathryn Sullivan, who became the first American woman to walk in space. Ride again used the robotic arm to deploy a satellite. STS-41G lasted eight days and was the first spaceflight on which two women flew together.
Ride was training for a third shuttle mission when the Challenger exploded after launch in January 1986, a catastrophe that caused NASA to suspend shuttle flights for more than two years. Ride served on the presidential commission appointed to investigate the accident. After the commission issued its report, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she produced the Ride Report, a strategic plan for the space agency that called for a lunar base and crewed missions to Mars by 2010.
The high point of the Challenger commission’s hearings was when physicist Richard Feynman’s simple but convincing demonstration of the failure that lead to the shuttle explosion. He bent a rubber O-ring in a clamp and dropped it into a glass of ice water. After a few minutes, Feynman pulled out the O-ring and unclamped it. The O-ring took some time to bounce back to its original shape, graphically demonstrating the similar loss of O-ring resiliency that happened when Challenger launched in 2 °C (36 °F) weather. The O-rings failed to seal a joint on the solid rocket booster, allowing hot exhaust gas to escape and eventually destroy the shuttle.
Only after Sally Ride’s death in 2012 was her part in Feynman’s demonstration revealed. A NASA whistleblower gave Ride a report showing that cold affected the O-rings. To protect her source, Ride passed the report to another commission member, Air Force general Donald Kutyna, who later told Popular Mechanics:
One day Sally Ride and I were walking together. She was on my right side and was looking straight ahead. She opened up her notebook and with her left hand, still looking straight ahead, gave me a piece of paper. Didn’t say a single word. I look at the piece of paper. It’s a NASA document. It’s got two columns on it. The first column is temperature, the second column is resiliency of O-rings as a function of temperature. It shows that they get stiff when it gets cold. Sally and I were really good buddies. She figured she could trust me to give me that piece of paper and not implicate her or the people at NASA who gave it to her, because they could all get fired.
To conceal Ride’s role, Kutyna invited Feynman to dinner and showed him the carburetor of a car he was restoring. Kutyna noted the carburetor’s O-rings leaked in cold temperatures. He asked Feynman if something similar happened to the shuttle. Feynman already suspected the O-rings had failed, and Kutyna’s question told him why.
After NASA
Sally Ride resigned from NASA in 1987, and in 1989 she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and director of its California Space Institute (until 1996). In 1999–2000 she held executive positions with Space.com, a website presenting space, astronomy, and technology content. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both asked her to be NASA administrator, but she declined.
In 2003, Ride served on the commission that investigated the Columbia breakup. Ride was the only person to serve on both the Challenger and Columbia commissions. Her initial surmise that the two disasters had the same unfortunate cause, a organizational culture that valued launching on schedule at the cost of astronaut safety, shaped the commission’s investigation.
From the 1990s Ride initiated or headed a number of programs and organizations devoted to fostering science in education, particularly to providing support for schoolgirls interested in science, mathematics, or technology. She also wrote or collaborated on several children’s books about space exploration and her personal experiences as an astronaut.
Ride married fellow astronaut Steven Hawley in 1982; they divorced five years later. She became partners in 1987 with Tam O’Shaughnessy, whom she had known as a young tennis player. They remained together for the rest of Ride’s life. Ride was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2011, and she died the next year. Her relationship with O’Shaughnessy was publicly revealed in Ride’s obituaries. Ride had been the first lesbian astronaut. (She had not revealed her prior relationships with women to the space agency before becoming an astronaut, and in the early 1990s NASA tried to make homosexuality a “psychiatrically disqualifying condition” for astronauts.) In 2013 she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. O’Shaughnessy accepted the award on her behalf.
