Sally Ride: First American Woman in Space (1983)
On June 18, 1983, Dr. Sally Ride launched aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger as a mission specialist on STS-7, becoming the first American woman — and, at 32, the youngest American astronaut — to fly in space. Her flight came twenty years after Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, and it marked a historic milestone in NASA's gradual inclusion of women and minorities in the astronaut corps.
The Physicist Who Answered an Ad
Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in Los Angeles. A gifted athlete who reached near-professional level in tennis as a teenager, she ultimately pursued physics, earning a bachelor's degree in English and physics from Stanford in 1973 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1978. That same year, she saw a newspaper ad from NASA recruiting a new class of astronauts — the first since 1969 — that, for the first time, explicitly invited women and minorities to apply. She applied on a whim and was selected as one of six women in the astronaut class of 1978, nicknamed the "TFNG" (Thirty-Five New Guys). NASA received more than 8,000 applications; 35 were selected. Before flying in space, Ride worked as a CAPCOM (capsule communicator) on two previous shuttle missions, the first woman to serve in that role. Her selection as the first American woman to fly was announced in 1983 and immediately made international headlines.
Did You Know?
In the lead-up to Sally Ride's flight, reporters asked her questions that would never have been asked of a male astronaut: Did she cry when things went wrong? Did she plan to bring makeup? Would weightlessness affect her menstrual cycle? Ride handled the questions with patience and occasional dry wit. NASA's engineers were so uncertain about how many tampons a woman would need for a six-day mission that they initially packed 100 — Ride diplomatically pointed out that the number was excessive.
STS-7: The Mission
The STS-7 mission launched on June 18, 1983, from Kennedy Space Center. The five-person crew deployed two communications satellites and conducted scientific experiments. Ride operated the shuttle's robotic arm — the Canadarm — to deploy and retrieve the SPAS-01 satellite, the first time the arm had been used to retrieve a free-flying spacecraft. The mission lasted six days, two hours, and 23 minutes. Landing at Edwards Air Force Base on June 24, Ride and the crew were greeted by crowds and media attention of historic proportions. Ride flew a second shuttle mission on STS-41-G in 1984 and was being trained for a third mission when the Challenger disaster in January 1986 grounded the shuttle fleet. She served on the Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger accident and later on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
A Legacy Beyond Space
Sally Ride left NASA in 1987 and returned to Stanford, later becoming a physics professor at UC San Diego. She founded Sally Ride Science in 2001 to create programs encouraging young people — especially girls — to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2013, the year she died of pancreatic cancer at age 61. A private person throughout her life, she had kept her 27-year relationship with her partner Tam O'Shaughnessy private; her obituary revealed that relationship publicly. She became — posthumously — the first known LGBTQ+ astronaut. Schools, parks, and research institutions have been named in her honor. The Navy named a ship — the USNS Sally Ride — after her. NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon including the first woman, explicitly invokes her legacy as the inspiration for a new generation of female astronauts.