Zahlen, bitte! – The first female US astronaut spent 343 hours in space
Sally Ride was not only the first American woman in space, she was also an uncomfortable critic of the space program and campaigned for diversity in space.
(Image: heise online)
Sally Ride was the third woman in space and the first US astronaut after the Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya. She spent a total of 343 hours in space on two space shuttle missions and was the youngest crew member on a NASA mission to date when her first space shuttle mission (STS-7) was launched on June 18, 1983. Before that, she was the first woman to be responsible for capsule communication with the space shuttle at the ground station on the second and third flights of the space shuttle.
(Image: NASA)
But Sally Kristen Ride's achievements are not limited to her participation in the space shuttle program. She pursued her private international understanding and met with cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya in Budapest in 1983, the second woman to fly into space and the first woman to make an exit from space in 1984.
Physics pro instead of tennis pro
Sally Ride was born in Los Angeles on May 26, 1951. She was such a good tennis player that tennis legend Billie Jean King advised her to turn professional in 1972. But studying physics was more important to her. It was here that she read at breakfast in a student newspaper that NASA was looking for astronauts. She applied in 1977 and entered the selection process along with five other pre-selected applicants. She prevailed and became the first female US astronaut in 1983. Not only that, but she flew into space on STS-7 and STS-41 G with the Space Shuttle.
Sally Ride ended her time at NASA with the publication of the so-called "Ride Report", which NASA superiors were reluctant to publish. The report by independent scientists argued in favor of first exploring planet Earth from space with a space station before humans set about building a moon station or even launching a mission to Mars.
(Image: NASA)
Critical member of two committees of inquiry
If the various Ride biographies are to be believed, her skeptical view of future space adventures was influenced by the fact that she was the only person to be a member of two commissions of inquiry that investigated the Space Shuttle accident. She made sure that details about the Challenger disaster that had been kept secret by NASA were made public via the physicist Richard Feynman.
After her time at NASA, she worked at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University on the question of how nuclear warheads and their missiles could be detected and controlled from space on Earth. She then became a physics professor at the University of San Diego in California, where she researched Thomson scattering.
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However, her real ambition was to get girls interested in science and space travel. In her career at NASA, she had experienced often enough how difficult the path is for a woman. At the start of the first six-day shuttle mission, she was asked whether 100 tampons would be enough because none of the men planning the mission knew anything about female physiology.
Embarrassing questions before her first flight as an astronaut
At the last press conference before her first flight, journalists asked embarrassing questions about make-up, children's wishes or periods, which were never asked of the men on the shuttle crew, she remarked piqued. Together with her partner Tam O'Shaughnessy, she wrote books such as "The Third Planet: Exploring the Earth from Space", which won several awards. This view of the Earth gave rise to the idea of the Sally Ride EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) and later the corresponding MoonKAM projects to introduce pupils and students to space travel.
(Image: NASA)
A place on the moon is named after Sally Ride, where NASA's Ebb and Flow satellites crashed onto the surface in 2012 after measuring the moon's gravity. Shortly before, on July 23, 2012, Sally Ride had died of pancreatic cancer. It only became known after her death that she had been in a lesbian relationship for 27 years. She is thus celebrated in the LBGTQ community as the first queer person in space.
Honors and memorials for her achievements
Barack Obama also posthumously awarded her the Medal of Freedom for her services to space travel and education. Her memory has long since found its way into pop culture: New York stand-up comedian Marcia Belsky recalled the bizarre anecdote about the tampons in her 2021 program "The 100 tampons NASA (almost) sent to space - and other absurd songs".
In the streaming series "For All Mankind" (AppleTV), which is set in an alternate reality in which the space shuttle space program continues without interruption, Sally Ride is played by actress Ellen Wroe. In the miniseries "The Challenger", which is currently in production, Sally Ride is played by actress Kristen Stewart. The series is expected to be released on Amazon Prime Video.
(dahe)
