RIDE, SALLY

born May 26, 1951, Encino, Calif., U.S. in full Sally Kristen Ride the first American woman to fly into outer space. Only two other women preceded her: Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982), both from the former Soviet Union. Ride showed great early promise as a tennis player, but she eventually abandoned her dream of playing professionally and attended Stanford University, where she earned a B.A. in English and a B.S. in physics in 1973. In 1978, as a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant in laser physics at Stanford, she was selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as one of six women astronaut candidates. She received her Ph.D. in astrophysics and began her training and evaluation courses that same year. In August of 1979 she completed her NASA training, obtained her pilot's license, and earned the title of shuttle mission specialist. After a number of years in this position, on June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space. The flight of the shuttle Challenger lasted six days, during which time she served as flight engineer and, along with the four male astronauts onboard, deployed several satellites.She completed a second space mission on October 13, 1984. The goal of this 13th shuttle mission was to deploy the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite as well as make scientific observations of the Earth with a large-format camera. On this mission, her childhood friend Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space.Ride resigned from NASA in 1987, and in 1989 she became director of the Space Science Institute at the University of California at San Diego. She was married to fellow astronaut Steven Hawley from 1982 to 1987. She wrote the children's books To Space and Back in 1986 (with Susan Okie) and Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System in 1992 (with T. O'Shaughnessy). Her book The Third Planet: Exploring the Earth from Space was published in 1994.