Sally Ride

Hillary and Chelsea

Hillary

I was in sixth grade when, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. I had watched the “space race” unfold as a little girl, with the United States and the Soviet Union competing to be the first to send a satellite into space. After the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, it set off a flurry of activity in our own country and inspired new investments in science, technology, and research. When NASA announced a little less than a year later that they were exploring the possibility of sending human beings into space, I was fascinated. In eighth grade, I wrote them a letter saying that I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and asking what I had to do to prepare. Someone wrote back thanking me for my interest but explaining that they weren’t taking girls into the program.

Of course, had my gender not stopped me from becoming an astronaut, my nearsightedness probably would have, but still I was outraged. It was one of the first times I can remember being told I couldn’t do something, not because of my personal inadequacies or any lack of skill but simply because I was a girl. I was upset on behalf of girls everywhere.

Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away, a little girl named Sally Ride in Encino, California, was also intrigued by space travel. “At the time I grew up, the space program was on the front page of the newspaper almost every day,” she recalled. “It was the coolest thing around. I idolized the astronauts, but I never thought really seriously about becoming one.” She was an excellent student with a passion for science, and a star tennis player. After high school, she enrolled at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania but couldn’t help but wonder whether she might have been missing out on the chance to have a successful career in tennis. After a year at Swarthmore, Sally dropped out to pursue the sport, then eventually decided to return to college. (According to her New York Times obituary: “Years later, when a child asked her what made her decide to be a scientist instead of a tennis player, she laughed and said, ‘A bad forehand.’ ”)

Chelsea

She then went to Stanford, where she studied English and physics. I’m pretty sure the first time I ever heard of Stanford was because of Sally Ride.

She stayed to earn a master’s and a PhD in physics. One day, she read an advertisement in the Stanford University newspaper: NASA was recruiting scientists—men and women—for the space shuttle program. “The women’s movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming,” she said later. She was one of more than eight thousand applicants for thirty-five positions in the first class of astronauts open to women, and to men of color. Sally was one of six women accepted; Guion “Guy” Bluford was one of three black men accepted.

Her astronaut class of 1978 was referred to as the “Thirty-Five New Guys,” or “TFNG.” Each of the six women who had been accepted had met rigid standards and were adamant that the bar for them be as high as it was for their male classmates. She and her fellow would-be astronauts practiced jumping out of planes with parachutes and surviving in open water. They underwent gravity and weightlessness training and learned how to fly a jet plane.

Meanwhile, the development of NASA’s first space shuttle was changing the landscape for future generations of women astronauts. It was bigger than a “capsule” and could fit a larger crew, opening opportunities for more people to join a mission in different roles. Six years earlier, NASA had begun to design spacesuits, seats, and crew equipment for a larger range of sizes, as well as modifying waste management systems for women.

After five years of training, Sally was selected as a mission specialist for a flight. She was chosen in part for her reputation as being unflappable and her experience with helping to build a robotic arm for the shuttle. Along with four crewmates, she launched aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-7. On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space. (Almost twenty years earlier to the day, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had become the first woman in space. Between Valentina and Sally, there was only one other woman, cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya. So, while it took NASA two decades after the first woman in orbit, there certainly wasn’t a rush anywhere in the world to support women pursuing celestial aspirations.)

Sally helped deploy and retrieve a satellite, the first time the shuttle was used to return a spacecraft to Earth. They landed six days after launch at Edwards Air Force Base in California. She grinned and told reporters: “I’m sure it was the most fun that I’ll ever have in my life.”

Hillary

I followed the launch from Arkansas with then three-year-old Chelsea by my side, poring over headlines and photos of the crowd of 250,000 at Cape Canaveral, which included people in T-shirts quoting the song “Ride Sally Ride.” I was struck by how much had changed in the two decades since I had written to NASA. Not only were women being accepted into the program, they were being actively recruited and sent into space. For the first time, the sky was quite literally the limit.

But it wasn’t easy. “The only bad moments in our training involved the press,” she later said in an interview with Gloria Steinem. “Whereas NASA appeared to be very enlightened about flying women astronauts, the press didn’t appear to be. The things they were concerned with were not the same things that I was concerned with.… Everybody wanted to know what kind of makeup I was taking up. They didn’t care about how well prepared I was to operate the arm, or deploy communications satellites.” (Even today, it’s hard to think of a woman in the public eye who couldn’t relate.) She endured questions about whether space flight would damage her reproductive organs and how she would go to the bathroom. Johnny Carson cracked that the shuttle flight might be delayed because Ride was looking for a purse to match her shoes.

“I never went into physics or the astronaut corps to become a role model. But after my first flight, it became clear to me that I was one. And I began to understand the importance of that to people. Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday. You can’t be what you can’t see.”

—SALLY RIDE

Chelsea

After the 1986 Challenger tragedy, when the space shuttle broke apart shortly after launch, killing all seven crew members, Sally’s astronaut career came to an end. Though she had been slated to go on the Challenger’s next flight, NASA temporarily suspended the shuttle program. By the time Sally left NASA, she had logged a total of 343 hours in space.

Her work for NASA and to support women in space continued. Sally served on the Challenger accident investigation board and was part of the team that articulated NASA’s long-term spaceflight goals. She devoted her life to closing the distance between Earth and space for everyone. Bonnie Dunbar, a fellow astronaut, described befriending Sally on the Flight Crew Operations coed softball team and remembered conversations about how lucky they had been to have “teachers and parents and other mentors who encouraged us to study math and science in school—the enabling subjects for becoming an astronaut.” Sally championed STEM education for young people from all backgrounds, especially young girls. She founded a company, Sally Ride Science, that provided science curriculums for schools. She started an online project through NASA in which middle school students could both shoot and download images of the Earth from space. Close to my heart as a mom and children’s book author, she also wrote wonderful space books for kids, delving into such topics as how to make a sandwich in space. (Quickly, before it floats away!)

Hillary

In March 2009, when I was secretary of state, I went to Israel and crossed over to the West Bank to Ramallah, to the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. I visited a classroom where Palestinian students were learning English through a U.S.-sponsored program. They were studying women’s history month, and their lesson was about Sally Ride. The students—especially the girls—were captivated by her story. When I asked for a single word to describe Sally and her accomplishments, a student responded: “Hopeful.”

Chelsea

Even after her death in 2012, Sally Ride kept breaking barriers. She came out as a lesbian quietly, without fanfare, in an obituary written by Dr. Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of twenty-seven years. At various chapters in her life, she worried that being open about who she was would hurt NASA, would hurt her company with corporate sponsors, would hurt her career. They didn’t hide their relationship from family and friends, but, heartbreakingly, they felt they had to wait until after Sally’s death to reveal it publicly. Not long after her death, Tam received a call that surprised her, from Ray Mabus, then secretary of the navy. The navy hoped to honor Sally by naming a research vessel after her. Secretary Mabus was calling to ask whether Tam would be the ship’s sponsor—a role that had, up until that point, been filled by the wife of the man for whom the ship was named. “I think it is fitting that the celebration of Sally’s legacy as a pioneering space explorer and a role model includes an acknowledgment of who she really was and what she cared about,” said Tam. The R/V Sally Ride, commissioned in 2016, is the first navy research ship named for a woman. Her legacy lives on in the scientific curiosity sparked in the girls and boys she continues to inspire, the ship that bears her name, and a spot on the moon named after her by NASA.