The Who2 Blog

Sally Ride: A Biography in Photos for Her 60th Birthday

Photo of Sally Ride on the flight deck of the space shuttle Challenger

Dr. Sally Ride turns 60 today, and you have to love this amazing photo of her on the flight deck of the space shuttle Challenger 28 years ago.  The year is 1983, and she has just become the first American woman in space.

Here's a Sally Ride space biography in photos.

asallyrideclass.jpgSally Ride with other female astronaut candidates, taking a break from
training in Florida in 1978.  That was the first year that NASA accepted
female candidates. Ride applied after reading about it in her school
newspaper; she earned her PhD in Physics from Stanford the same year.  From left: Sally Ride, Judith Resnick, Anna Fisher, Kathryn Sullivan,
Rhea Seddon.

Resnick, alas, was killed in the explosion of the
shuttle Challenger in 1986.

asallyridecapcom.jpg
Sally Ride in the trenches at Mission Control. (Diet Pepsi all around!) She served as communications officer -- "CAPCOM," in NASA lingo -- for the second and third shuttle flights, in 1981 and 1982.  Her flight in 1983 was the seventh overall.

Photo of Sally Ride in science scrubs, looking at scientific stuffSally Ride and Anna Fisher take part in a mission sequence test at Kennedy Space Center. Dig the space scrubs.

Photo of Sally Ride and the crew of space shuttle mission STS-7 Sally Ride with the crew of STS-7 in 1983.  It was the first shuttle mission with a five-person crew, as well as the first U.S. space mission with a female astronaut. (The Americans were a wee bit behind the Russians there: Valentina Tereshkova spent three days in space in 1963.)

From left to right: Sally Ride, John Fabian, Commander Bob Crippen, Norm Thagard, Pilot Frederick Hauck. 

Photo of Sally Ride, helmet beside her, looking down from the open cockpit of a sleek T-38 jetThree days before blastoff: Sally Ride
looks down from the cockpit of a T-38 jet before flying from Houston to Kennedy Space
Center in Florida. She launched into space on June 18th, 1983.

Photo of Sally Ride working inside the space shuttleSo much for the glamour of space travel. Sally Ride uses a screwdriver to clear an air filter aboard the Challenger during the flight of STS-7.  According to NASA, "Her shirt features a cartoon of 35 busy astronauts around a shuttle with the acronym TFNG, which stands for 'thirty five new guys,' a nickname for the 1978 astronaut class."

Photo of Sally Ride standing -- well, floating -- on the space shuttle ChallengerAnother shot from that first trip aboard the Challenger. They landed safely on June 24th, 1983, after a six-day mission.

Sally Ride flew again in 1984 and was scheduled to go up again in 1986. The Challenger explosion changed all that.  She served (along with Neil Armstrong) on the Presidential commission that looked into the accident, and retired from NASA in 1987 after a whirlwind decade.

Photo of Sally Ride at a basic office meeting deskToday she's the founder and CEO of Sally Ride Science, which creates school programs and teacher trainings in science, math and technology. Their website says they support "girls' and boys' interests in science" -- but if she takes just a little more interest in the girls, who could blame her?  Happy 60th birthday, Dr. Ride.

See our biography of Sally Ride >>

{ Photos: NASA. Final photo: Rebecca Lawson Photography / Sally Ride Science }

posted | by Mr. Holznagel

Tags: