🇺🇸Sally
Ride

Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in Los Angeles, California, into a family that took education seriously and took talent where it found it. Her father was a professor of political science, her mother a volunteer counselor. She was gifted at science from an early age but gifted at tennis too — good enough that Billie Jean King, who saw her play when Ride was a teenager, encouraged her to pursue a professional career. She chose physics instead, or rather the two careers ran in parallel until she had to pick one: she was ranked eighteenth nationally in junior tennis when she enrolled at Stanford University, and she kept playing while studying physics, eventually letting tennis become a hobby and science become a life. She completed her bachelor's degree in physics and English simultaneously in 1973, then stayed at Stanford for a master's and a doctorate in physics, specializing in free electron lasers and X-ray astronomy. In 1977, while finishing her dissertation, she saw a notice in the Stanford student newspaper: NASA was accepting applications for astronaut candidates for the first time since 1969, and for the first time in history, women were eligible.

Ride applied. She was one of 8,079 applicants. NASA selected 35 candidates, including six women, and Ride was among them. She joined NASA in 1978, trained as a mission specialist, and worked as a capsule communicator — the person on the ground who talks to orbiting crews — on the second and third Space Shuttle missions. NASA announced in 1982 that she would fly on STS-7, the seventh Space Shuttle flight and the second flight of Challenger. The announcement made her famous before she had left the ground. She was thirty-one years old, a physicist with a doctorate, trained in the operation of the Shuttle's robotic arm — the Canadarm — and suddenly one of the most recognized faces in America. The press found her composure maddening. She refused to perform gender as part of her role as pioneer. When a reporter asked whether she cried when things went wrong in the simulator, she said, "How come nobody asks Rick Aldrich that question?" Rick Aldrich was one of her male crewmates. The reporter didn't have an answer.

STS-7 launched on June 18, 1983. Ride operated the Canadarm to deploy and retrieve the SPAS-01 satellite, making her the first American to use the robotic arm in orbit — a task that required exactly the kind of three-dimensional spatial reasoning and fine motor control in a spacesuit that her physics training and general athletic ability had prepared her for. The five-day mission was technically successful on every count. Ride performed her duties with the precision that her training demanded and the ease that her abilities allowed. She did not treat the flight as historic. She treated it as work. That was, in its own way, the most powerful statement she could have made about what her presence in space meant: not that women were special enough to deserve a place there, but that a woman was simply doing her job, professionally, in space, the same as her crewmates.

Ride flew again on STS-41-G in October 1984, becoming the first American woman to fly in space twice. She was in training for a third mission when the Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members seventy-three seconds after launch due to an O-ring failure in a solid rocket booster. Ride was appointed to the Rogers Commission investigating the disaster — the only active astronaut on the panel — and played a crucial role in identifying the technical and organizational failures that had led to it. She returned to NASA afterward but resigned in 1987, joining the faculty at Stanford and later the University of California San Diego, where she became a full professor of physics and spent two decades teaching and researching.

In 2001, Ride founded Sally Ride Science, a company dedicated to creating science programs and publications aimed at girls in middle school — the age, she had identified, at which many girls begin to lose interest in science under the pressure of social expectations. She also served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board following the second Space Shuttle disaster in 2003, making her the only person to have served on both Shuttle accident investigation boards. She died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012, at the age of sixty-one. Her obituary revealed, at her family's direction, that she had been in a relationship with her partner Tam O'Shaughnessy for twenty-seven years — a fact she had never disclosed publicly, which made her, posthumously, the first known LGBT astronaut. President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2013. The Mount Sylvester area in Antarctica, a NASA satellite, and numerous schools and scholarships bear her name. She was, in the simplest terms, the best scientist-astronaut in the program at the time she flew, and the fact that she was also the first American woman in space was a distinction she wore lightly, because she understood that the point was not the first but the last: the day when it would stop being a distinction at all.