Sally Ride

• 1. Introduction

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  Sally Kristen Ride was born on the 26th of May, 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and died on the 23rd of July, 2012, having spent more than 343 hours in space and nearly three decades of her private life hidden from the world. She was the first American woman to fly in space, the youngest American astronaut to have done so at the age of 32, and, as her obituary would reveal only at her death, the first known LGBTQ astronaut. Those last three facts belong to three different stories. What kind of person becomes all of them at once? How did a tennis prodigy from the San Fernando Valley end up operating a robotic arm aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger? And what does it mean that the woman the country celebrated as a barrier-breaking icon chose to keep her truest self hidden until she was gone? This is the story of Sally Ride: physicist, astronaut, educator, and private person.

• 2. The Unlikely Astronaut

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  At nine years old, Sally Ride played tennis for the first time while her family spent a year traveling in Europe. She took to it fast. By the time she was 10, she was being coached by Alice Marble, a former world number one. By 1963 she was ranked number 20 in Southern California for girls aged 12 and under. Tennis, not science, looked like her future.

  At Westlake School for Girls, a physiology teacher named Elizabeth Mommaerts became a mentor, and Ride resolved to become an astrophysicist. But that decision was tested almost immediately. She enrolled at Swarthmore College on a full scholarship, won the Eastern Intercollegiate Women's Singles title, then returned to California in January 1970 determined to make a career in professional tennis. After playing three matches in a single August morning, her whole body ached the following day. She calculated that she would need to practice for eight hours a day to reach the required fitness level. She decided she did not have what it took.

  She transferred to Stanford University, where she eventually earned a Bachelor of Science in physics and a Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1973, a Master of Science in 1975, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1978. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Arthur B. C. Walker Jr., examined the interaction of X-rays with the interstellar medium. In January 1977, she spotted an article on the front page of The Stanford Daily: NASA was recruiting astronauts for the Space Shuttle program and wanted women. She mailed in a request for the application forms that day.

• 3. TFNG

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  NASA received 8,079 applications by the 30th of June 1977, deadline. Ride became one of 208 finalists, and on the 16th of January, 1978, she received a phone call from George Abbey, NASA's director of flight operations, informing her she had been selected as part of NASA Astronaut Group 8. She was one of six women among 35 candidates. The group called itself "TFNG": officially, "Thirty-Five New Guys," and unofficially something rather more colorful.

  Ride was graded a civil service GS-12, with a salary of US$21,883. Astronaut candidate training included learning to fly NASA's T-38 Talon jet aircraft. Officially, mission specialists were only required to ride in the back seat and handle an emergency if the pilot became incapacitated. Many pilots ignored that rule and let the more proficient candidates fly lower. John Fabian even had Ride fly under the hood, with the windows blacked out, navigating by instruments alone. She enjoyed it so much she took private lessons and earned a private pilot's license, then bought a part interest in a Grumman Tiger she flew on weekends.

  During training she began dating Steven Hawley, another TFNG. They married on the 26th of July, 1982, in the backyard of Hawley's parents' house in Salina, Kansas. Ride flew up from Houston in her Grumman Tiger and wore white jeans. The ceremony was kept deliberately small, with only parents and siblings present. Ride did not take her husband's name. Meanwhile, she had been helping develop the Space Shuttle's robotic arm, known as the Canadarm, and had become the first woman to serve as a ground-based capsule communicator, the CapCom voice linking Mission Control to crews in orbit.

• 4. Challenger and STS-7

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  On the 24th of May, 1983, days before her first launch, reporters at the pre-flight press conference asked Ride whether the flight would affect her reproductive organs and whether she wept when things went wrong on the job. She said she saw herself in only one way: as an astronaut. Engineers had already asked her to help design a "space makeup kit," and had proposed sending her into orbit with a supply of 100 tampons for a six-day mission.

  When Challenger lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on the 18th of June, 1983, many of the spectators wore T-shirts bearing the words "Ride, Sally Ride," lyrics from Wilson Pickett's song "Mustang Sally." The mission, STS-7, deployed two communications satellites: Anik C2 for Telesat of Canada and Palapa B1 for Indonesia. Ride's main responsibility was operating the robotic arm to deploy and then retrieve the first Shuttle pallet satellite, SPAS-1, which carried ten experiments on the formation of metal alloys in microgravity. She also manipulated the arm into the shape of a "7" to match the mission patch. STS-7 was the first occasion the Space Shuttle in orbit was photographed, using SPAS-1's own camera.

  Bad weather forced Challenger to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California rather than Kennedy. The mission lasted 6 days, 2 hours, 23 minutes, and 59 seconds. Afterward, Ride and her crewmates toured the country. She met Governor George Deukmejian and Mayor Ed Koch, testified before the Congressional Space Caucus on the robotic arm, and addressed the National Press Club. She declined to appear with Bob Hope, whom she regarded as sexist. The crew presented President Ronald Reagan with jelly beans that had been flown on the flight. In September 1983, on her own initiative, she met Svetlana Savitskaya, the second woman to fly in space, in Budapest; the two talked for six hours and exchanged signed memorabilia.

• 5. The Second Flight

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  Robert Crippen requested Ride for the crew of STS-41-G while she was still on the post-STS-7 publicity tour. On the 5th of October, 1984, Challenger lifted off again from the Kennedy Space Center. During the mission, Ride carried a white silk scarf that had been worn by Amelia Earhart.

  She became the first American woman to fly in space twice. Her crewmate Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to perform a spacewalk, though Soviet cosmonaut Savitskaya had already achieved both firsts internationally. It was the first time two women had been in space together.

  When the SIR-B synthetic aperture radar antenna failed to unfold correctly, Ride used the robotic arm to shake it loose, moving it faster than she had been trained to do. She later used the same arm to nudge a stubborn antenna panel closed when its latches failed. Challenger completed 132 orbits of the Earth in 197.5 hours, landing back at the Kennedy Space Center on the 13th of October, 1984. Between her two flights, Ride had spent over 343 hours in space.

• 6. The Challenger Investigation

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  Ride was training for a third mission, STS-61-M, when the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred in January 1986. She was appointed to the Rogers Commission, the presidential panel investigating the explosion, and led its subcommittee on operations. She was the only Space Shuttle astronaut and the only current NASA employee on the commission.

  After her death in 2012, Major General Donald J. Kutyna revealed that Ride had quietly passed him key information: O-rings become stiff at low temperatures. That finding was ultimately identified as the cause of the disaster. To protect her as a source, the information was fed to physicist Richard Feynman, who is publicly credited with surfacing the O-ring problem. Ride was deeply unsettled by evidence of dysfunctional management and risk-assessment failures at NASA. According to Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who had warned of the technical problems beforehand and was subsequently shunned by his colleagues at O-ring supplier Morton-Thiokol, Ride was the only public figure to openly support him. She hugged him publicly to show that support.

  The Rogers Commission submitted its report on the 6th of June, 1986. Ride then moved to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she led the agency's first strategic planning effort and authored a report titled "NASA Leadership and America's Future in Space." NASA management was unhappy with its emphasis on Earth exploration over a Mars mission. She also founded NASA's Office of Exploration. In October 1986, she co-wrote a children's book, To Space and Back, with her old high school friend Sue Okie.

• 7. A Life After NASA

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  In May 1987, Ride announced she was leaving NASA. She divorced Hawley in June. Her post-NASA path led first to Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control, where colleagues included Condoleezza Rice, a Soviet Union specialist. When her fellowship ended, Sidney Drell tried and failed to secure her a permanent professorship at Stanford. Drell resigned from the center in protest.

  On the 1st of July, 1989, Ride became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the California Space Institute. Her salary was $64,000 plus a $6,000 stipend as director of an institute with 28 staff and a budget of $3.3 million. Her research focused on nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She remained director of Cal Space until 1996 and retired from UCSD in 2007.

  From the mid-1990s until her death, Ride led two NASA outreach programs, ISS EarthKAM and GRAIL MoonKAM, which let middle school students request satellite images of Earth and the Moon. She turned down offers from President Bill Clinton to become NASA Administrator, not wanting to leave California. President Clinton did appoint her to a panel chaired by John Holdren to assess the risk of fissile materials falling into terrorist hands following the Soviet Union's collapse. From September 1999 to July 2000, she served as president of the space news website Space.com. She then co-founded Sally Ride Science with Tam O'Shaughnessy, producing science programs and publications aimed at upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls. In 2003, she served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, becoming the only person to have participated in both shuttle disaster investigations.

• 8. The Hidden Life

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  Ride drew up her will in 1992, ensuring that O'Shaughnessy would inherit her estate. The two had known each other since the junior tennis circuit. Their relationship began in 1985, when Ride was still married to Hawley and O'Shaughnessy was living in Atlanta. Ride visited when speaking engagements took her there.

  On the 10th of March, 2011, O'Shaughnessy noticed at a teachers' conference in San Francisco that Ride looked ill. A medical ultrasound revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in her abdomen; it was pancreatic cancer. They registered their domestic partnership on the 15th of August, 2011. On the 27th of October, surgeons removed part of Ride's pancreas, bile duct, stomach, intestine, and her gallbladder. She died on the 23rd of July, 2012, at the age of 61, at her home in La Jolla.

  Her obituary identified O'Shaughnessy as her partner of 27 years, making Ride the first astronaut publicly known to have been LGBTQ. Her sister Bear confirmed the relationship, saying Ride had chosen to keep her personal life, including her illness and treatment, private. Ride's ashes were interred next to those of her father at Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in Santa Monica.

  Honors followed: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to O'Shaughnessy at the White House on the 20th of November, 2013; induction into the Legacy Walk in Chicago in 2014; a research ship christened by O'Shaughnessy on the 9th of August, 2014, the first vessel in the research fleet named after a female scientist; and in March 2022, her appearance on the American Women quarters series, the first known LGBTQ person on U.S. currency. On the 28th of January, 2025, National Geographic premiered a documentary called Sally, tracing her hidden relationship with O'Shaughnessy. Director Cristina Costantini said of the timing: "We made this movie not thinking it was particularly controversial; we had no idea it would be this relevant."