Tuesday, June 2, 2009

June 18, 1983: Sally Ride, the First American Woman Into Space

Tony Long 06.18.07

1983: Sally Ride becomes the first American woman to travel into space.
Ride, who hoped to become a professional tennis player before deciding she wasn't good enough, became a physicist instead and joined NASA in 1978 as part of the first astronaut class to accept women.

After the usual training, Ride joined ground control for the second and third space shuttle missions, serving as communications liaison between the shuttle crews and mission control. She was also involved in developing the robot arm used aboard the shuttle craft to deploy and retrieve satellites.

Ride's turn to go into space came at the shuttle program's seventh mission, as a crew member aboard Challenger. She was aboard Challenger for her second flight as well, an eight-day mission in 1984. In all, Ride logged around 345 hours in space.

While it was a milestone for the U.S. space program, the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova preceded Ride into space by almost exactly 20 years. On June 16, 1963, the former textile worker went aloft aboard Vostok VI.

Ride was training for her third mission when Challenger blew up in January 1986, killing everyone on board. With all training suspended in the wake of the accident, Ride was appointed to the presidential commission charged with investigating the causes of Challenger's demise.

She retired from NASA in 1987 to return to Stanford University, her alma mater. She later joined the faculty at UC San Diego as a physics professor.

Since leaving NASA, Ride has remained active in the academic side of space exploration, taking a special interest in attracting more women to the sciences in general, and the space program in particular.

(Sources: NASA, Lucidcafe.com)

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