Sally Ride

American astronaut, one of a five-member crew and America's first woman in space on the Challenger 06/18/1983. Ride was one of 1,000 women and 7,000 men who applied for 35 available slots in the astronaut class of 1978. Her powers of concentration and logic stood out from the crowd. Her training consisted of becoming a proficient jet pilot and flight engineer. Ride was able to solve quadratic equations in her head. The media spotlight on the first American woman in space made the astronaut extremely uncomfortable. She despised the intrusive nature and personal questions posed to her by the press. Private and thoughtful, Ride set her own barriers from the press, refusing to offer information about her personal life. In a family of four in suburban Encino, CA, Ride was the eldest of two daughters. Her father, Dale Ride, taught political science at Santa Monica College. Her mother, Joyce, taught English as a second language in school. Ride and her sister "Bear" was raised by loving, unobtrusive parents though she learned from her mother a disdain for cooking and housework. Dinner might consist of a meal of crackers, nuts or cheese, whatever the family member wanted to fix for themselves, independent of others. She was a gifted athlete as a child. At 18, Ride ranked nationally in the amateur teen tennis championship though her parents and coach felt she lacked the killer instinct for professional sports. Ride played tennis in order to avoid going to the Presbyterian Church on Sunday. She attended the prestigious private school, Westlake High School for girls on a partial scholarship. In her junior year, Ride discovered science when UCLA professor Elizabeth Mommaerts taught physiology at the school. For the first time Ride saw logic personified as clear-thinking. She became hooked on science and became great friends with Mommaerts. It was a heavy blow when Professor Elizabeth Mommaerts committed suicide in 1972. In 1967, before graduation from Westlake in 1968, Ride applied to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She stayed for three semesters than transferred to Stanford University because of her California homesickness. She earned her B.A. in English and physics in 1973 and completed her graduate work in astrophysics in 1975 with an M.A. Her Ph. D. thesis in 1978 was in the study of the theoretical behavior of free electrons in a magnetic field. Her investigation was almost entirely in the abstract with sets of equations. In 1977, while finishing her doctoral work, Ride read in the campus newspaper about the openings in the astronaut program. Never known as a goal-orientated person, Ride with enrolled in the program quite spontaneously. She made the cuts and became one of the 35 individuals for the astronaut class of July 1978. A sports nut and Shakespeare buff, she is competitive and cool under pressure. For two years Ride worked an engineering job designing the shuttle's remote manipulator arm. During the second shuttle mission, she was given the high-visibility job of capcom, the capsule communicator who relays information from the flight director to the astronauts. Future crew members were usually drawn from the ranks of the capcoms. On the third mission, Ride was again assigned the role of capcom. She was listed as a mission specialist and tapped for her Challenger mission. Ride met her husband, Steven Hawley when they both entered the astronaut program at NASA. They had a small wedding in July 1982 with only the immediate family in attendance. The bride wore Levi's and a rugby shirt. Ride wears little make-up and prefers to wear no jewelry except her wedding band, and carries no purse. She made two more flights before resigning NASA in May 1987. She and Hawley divorced in April 1987. She became a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego. In the decade after Ride left NASA, 30 other American women have become astronauts, leaving Ride proud to be a role model and original woman-in-space, chalking up a total of 343 hours in space. She spent some of her time traveling the country to encourage young women to strive for careers in math and science. Ride died on 23 July 2012, after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, LaJolla, California. Link to Wikipedia biography