Sally Ride

Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in Encino, in the Los Angeles area of California. A nationally ranked junior tennis player, she considered turning professional before committing fully to science, earning bachelor's degrees in both English and physics from Stanford University, followed by a master's and a Ph.D. in physics, where her research addressed astrophysics and free-electron lasers. In 1977 she answered a newspaper advertisement in which NASA sought astronaut applicants, part of a landmark effort to diversify the corps. Out of thousands of candidates she was chosen in 1978 as one of the first six women selected as NASA astronauts, in the first class recruited for the Space Shuttle.

Ride flew twice, both times aboard the orbiter Challenger. On STS-7, launched June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space and, at age 32, the youngest American to have flown at that time. As a mission specialist she operated the shuttle's Canadian-built robotic arm to deploy and retrieve satellites, helping pioneer the use of the arm for satellite servicing. She returned to orbit on STS-41-G, launched October 5, 1984, an eight-day flight that carried a seven-person crew and included the first spacewalk by an American woman, fellow astronaut Kathryn Sullivan. Ride logged more than 340 hours in space across the two missions. She was assigned to a third flight, but training ended when the shuttle program was grounded after the 1986 Challenger disaster; she then served on the presidential commission investigating the accident, the only person to sit on both the Challenger and, later, the Columbia investigation boards.

After leaving NASA, Ride became a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego, and devoted herself to science education, founding Sally Ride Science to encourage young people, especially middle-school girls, to pursue careers in STEM, and co-authoring several science books for children. She kept her personal life fiercely private. Sally Ride died on July 23, 2012, at age 61, after a seventeen-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Her obituary revealed that she had shared 27 years of her life with her partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, making her posthumously recognized as the first known LGBTQ+ astronaut. In 2013 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she remains an enduring role model for women and girls in science.