Sally Ride

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**Sally Kristen Ride**
Astronaut

Nationality	American
Born	May 26, 1951 Encino, Los Angeles, California
Occupation¹	Physicist
Space time	14d 07h 46m
Selection	1978 NASA Group
Mission(s)	STS-7, STS-41-G
Mission insignia
¹ previous or current

Sally Kristen Ride (born May 26, 1951) is a former astronaut and became the first American woman to reach outer space, in 1983. She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982). She was married for a time to NASA Astronaut Steve Hawley.

Sally Ride was born in Encino, Los Angeles, California and attended high school at Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles (now Harvard-Westlake School). In addition to being interested in science she was a nationally ranked tennis player. She initially attended Swarthmore College but received her bachelor's degrees (in English and physics) from Stanford University near Palo Alto, California. She then received a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics at the same institution, while doing research in astrophysics and free-electron laser physics.

Ride joined NASA in 1978 as part of the first astronaut class to accept women. As part of her training she was the Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights (STS-2 and STS-3) and helped develop the Space Shuttle's robot arm. On June 18, 1983 she became the first American woman in space as a crewmember on Space Shuttle Challenger for STS-7. On STS-7, the 5-person crew deployed two communications satellites, conducted pharmaceutical experiments, and was the first to use the robot arm to release a satellite into space and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite. Her second space flight was in 1984, also on board the Challenger. She has cumulatively spent more than 343 hours in space. Ride was 8 months into training for her third flight at the time of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. She was named to the Presidential Commission investigating the accident, and headed its Subcommittee on Operations. After the investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. There she led NASA's first strategic planning effort, authoring a report entitled "Leadership and America's Future in Space", and founded NASA's Office of Exploration.

In 1987, Ride left to work at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the California Space Institute. In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She is currently on leave from the university and is the President and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company that creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls.

Ride has received numerous honors and awards, including the Jefferson Award for Public Service, the von Braun Award, the Lindbergh Eagle, and the NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Award. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame, and has twice been awarded the National Spaceflight Medal. Ride is the only person to serve on both of the panels investigating Shuttle accidents (those for the Challenger explosion and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster). Sally K. Ride Elementary School in The Woodlands, Texas is named in her honor.

Ride has long been an advocate for improved science education and has written several children's books about space exploration, including The Third Planet, Exploring Earth from Space, To Space and Back, Voyager, and The Mystery of Mars. She also wrote the short story "Single Room, Earth View", describing her personal experience in space.