Thank You, Sally Ride.

Sally Ride's spaceflight was one giant leap for womankind

By Patt Morrison

July 24, 2012, 11:07 a.m.

Sally Ride was not just along for the ride.

The first American woman in space, who died Monday at age 61 of pancreatic cancer, earned her seat in the astronaut program, and on the space shuttle. Sally Kristen Ride was an astrophysics PhD from Stanford. She went aloft 20 years after the Soviets earned bragging rights for putting the first woman into space, a onetime textile worker, Valentina Tereshkova, launched in June 1963 as a space-race PR stunt.

Sally Ride was the real deal, a scientist with major chops, when she stepped -- or was nudged -- onto the national stage in 1978, as one of the first group of women destined for the astronaut corps.

Women as varied as feminist leader Gloria Steinem and right-wing stalwart Phyllis Schlafly had words of praise for Ride, and by the time Ride went into space in 1983, every woman I knew was thrilled at the prospect of her joining the "right stuff" brigade. People cranked up "Mustang Sally" and sang along with special gusto to "Ride, Sally, ride!"

It was an impressive decade of firsts for women. In 1984, a year after Ride went into space, former Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale made Geraldine Ferraro the first woman on a major-party ticket, as his own vice presidential nominee. That didn’t work out so great for the Democrats, but it whacked another glass ceiling.

As with the women-in-space program, not everyone knew how to handle the Ferraro candidacy. Republican vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush’s wife, Barbara, the future first lady, described Ferraro as a "$4-million -- I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich," and no one believed her when she explained that she was thinking of the world "witch." Barbara Bush apologized, but a few days later, Bush’s press secretary referred to Ferraro as "bitchy," and did not.

Ride was not girly enough or self-revelatory enough for some reporters, nor did she seem to give two hoots what that cadre thought of her. She wore trousers when she got married to a fellow astronaut in 1982. (They divorced, and Ride spent more than a quarter-century with her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessey.) As she told the "Today"’ show a month before her shuttle trip, "There are aspects of being the first woman in space that I’m not going to enjoy," and the media attention was a big piece of that.

In the testosterone jockosphere that was the astronaut corps and its predecessor, the test-pilot corps, some men in the press pool and in the space program were floundering for the right words to describe the female right stuff, and they sometimes fell back on language that sounded more 1950s than 1970s and '80s.

"There are," Ride acknowledged, "people within NASA who need convincing." She would have been much happier, I suspect, in the present day, when the presence of women in NASA is no big deal and every girl can dream of a career in science or technology or aerospace without being scoffed at and told, "Girls can’t do that." But she had a big hand in making the extraordinary -- a female astronaut -- routine.

When Ride was among the six women first named to the potential astronaut pool in 1978, a Washington Post reporter described one of the other women as "petite and blond."

Johnson Space Center Director Christopher Kraft had introduced the women as part of a larger training group (one that included African Americans) as "a great bunch of guys … well, girls are called guys these days." Shuttle commander Robert Crippen later introduced his crew and playfully called Ride "undoubtedly the prettiest member of the flight crew."

One reporter even asked her whether she cried under stress.

Really. Word.

I was actually pleasantly surprised not to run across a story recounting how one of them had asked her whether she became irrational during her periods.

When Neil Armstrong’s was the first human foot to be set upon the moon, Armstrong said (don't go emailing me to niggle over this; the transmission from the moon evidently dropped the article "a") he was making "one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind." That was 14 years before Ride went into space; today, the script would surely read "one small step for a human; one giant leap for humankind."

Ride, an Encino native who later lived in La Jolla, went on to advise NASA. She pioneered science education for girls and boys and wrote children's science books.

She also served on the commission investigating the Challenger explosion. And when I heard of Ride’s death, I remembered the poem "High Flight" that President Reagan quoted about the disaster.

It was written by John Magee Jr., a World War II pilot who had been born to missionaries, an American father and a British mother. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, and was killed a few days after Pearl Harbor, in a midair collision with another Allied plane over Britain. He was 19 years old.

Magee wrote the poem not as a funerary tribute but as a celebration of the thrill of untrammeled flight, and the poem became beloved of pilots and astronauts. It reads, in part,

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;


Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of …

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.


Sally Ride was a 10-year-old tennis buff in Encino in February 1962 when John Glenn, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, sat a few seconds away from the launch that would make him the first American to orbit the planet. His colleague Scott Carpenter sent Glenn off to his first departure from Earth with a word that befits Sally Ride's last one: Godspeed.