Sally Ride HerStory

For pride month’s HerStory, we’re featuring Sally Ride, an American astronaut and physicist and the first American woman in space. She joined NASA in 1978 where she helped develop the space shuttle’s robot arm, and served as CapCom—the person on the ground who communicates directly with the space crew—on two of its missions. In 1983, she became the first American woman in space, and the youngest, as a crew member on Challenger for the STS-7 mission. She went into space again for STS-41-G, and was in training for her third mission when Challenger was destroyed. Ride was on the committee to investigate the disaster and was the only one to support the engineer who had warned of technical problems prior to lift-off. She retired from NASA in 1987 and began to teach, dedicating herself to encouraging children, especially girls, to love science. She had a 27-year same-sex relationship with her partner Tam O'Shaughnessy, who was also the co-author of several of her books, and co-founder of her educational company Sally Ride Science.