TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83cappeo.1

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 14.3 KB | 273 lines

                                                                                June 13, 1983

NATION

Sally's Joy Ride into the Sky


The first American woman to fly in space shows she has got the
Right Stuff


A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient
Babylonian Pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and
ledges . . . The idea was to prove at every foot of the way
that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the
right stuff and could move higher and higher and
even--ultimately, God willing, one day--that you might be able
to join that special few at the very top, the very Brotherhood
of the Right Stuff itself.

--Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Brotherhood indeed!  True, those male jet jockeys opened the
space age with daredevil rides in rinky-dink tin capsules and
kangaroo hops across the lunar wasteland. But move over, buddy.
The women are coming, breaching that old space boys' club and
bursting into what Ms. magazine sardonically calls NASA's world
of "flaming phallic rockets." During the next shuttle launch,
sitting right there behind the skipper and his co-pilot,
watching those blinking dials and video displays with her eagle
eyes, will be Sally Kristen Ride, 32, former schoolgirl tennis
star, Ph.D. in physics, cool, witty and attractive, and the
possessor of just about as much of the Right Stuff as any man
who ever preceded her into space.

NASA, to be sure, is keeping its bureaucratic composure; there
has been no flamboyant talk about one giant step for womankind.
The fact that Sally Ride will be drifting in the cosmos, the
first American woman in space, gets only the barest mention in
the press handout for the upcoming flight of the Challenger,
scheduled for Saturday morning, June 18. NASA's flacks spend
most of their energy detailing much more mundane aspects of the
seventh shuttle mission:  that will carry aloft two more
communications satellites, one Canadian, the other Indonesian;
that the five-man (oops!) -member crew will be the largest yet
launched in any space vehicle; and that the 100-ton craft will
glide to a landing for the first time on a new three-mile strip
at Florida's Kennedy Space Center rather on the Western deserts,
where there is more room for error.

Team player that she is, Ride insists that her participation in
the flight, which will pack her into a small, camper-size cabin
for a week with four men, is "no big deal,"  Says she:  "I
didn't come into the space program to be the first woman in
space. I came in to get a chance to fly as soon as I could."
Certainly there is nothing intrinsically extraordinary about
her achievement. Woman have been doing just about everything
else in recent years, even piloting jet aircraft as big or
bigger than the shuttle. So why not space? Indeed, in a
Marxist-Leninist bow to women's lib, the Soviets launched a
woman cosmonaut precisely 20 years ago, though a second did not
follow until last summer. "It's too bad," scowls Ride, "that
society isn't to the point yet where the country could just send
up a woman astronaut and nobody would think twice about it."

Still, whether she likes it or not, here flight has gripped the
public fancy. She has been interviewed again and again by
newspapers and television. Last week at a White House luncheon
for the Challenger crew--the only one given so far before a
shuttle flight-President Reagan gave her an extra share of his
attention. Nothing, it seems, symbolizes the progress of
American women in the past decade quite so much as the vision
of a female astronaut climbing toward the stars.

Sally's ride--the word play is irresistible--is, however, only
one sign of a major change in what can no longer properly be
called the U.S. manned space program. In fact, the elite circle
has all but become a melting pot. Among its 78 members, there
are now four blacks, two Jews and one naturalized American who
happens to be part Chinese. Two Europeans, a German and a
Dutchman, are training for a shuttle flight later this year.
But NASA seems to feel no particular guilt about its past
neglect.

Explains Christopher Kraft, former director of the Johnson
Space Center: "There were no women in the beginning because they
didn't meet the qualifications. The men were all test pilots.
They were used to life-and-death situations and put their lives
on the line everyday." In other words, the space agency did not
believe it could find female pilots good enough to handle the
challenge of space flight.

All that is now chauvinist history. Moreover, much of the
daredevil aspect has gone out of space travel. No longer are
astronauts subjected to bone-crunching lift-offs or breathtaking
splashdowns into the Pacific. The shuttle has made the going
easy. NASA is even talking of inviting ordinary folk along for
rides. Marvels Kraft: "They're flying in shirtsleeves."  Along
with the improving conditions has come a change of emphasis.
The object is not simply getting into orbit but actually working
there. As a result, says veteran Director of Flight Operations
George Abbey, "the pilot's job is no longer the prime job."
Increasingly, the responsibilities of a mission--and indeed the
entire shuttle program--will fall upon a new breed of astronauts
called mission specialists.

Being one of those pioneers is more important to Ride than all
the first-female flutter. Like her, the specialists are being
recruited largely from the ranks of young scientists. It will
be their job to perform in orbit the complex tasks that NASA
envisions, including experiments aboard the European-built
Spacelab, a self-contained laboratory that will be carried in
the shuttle's cargo hold later in the year. Already under way
in earlier flights are a wide range of experiments, from
creating superpure pharmaceuticals to growing near perfect
crystals for the electronics industry. Indeed NASA hopes to
show by much work that the shuttle, which has recently come
under criticism as economically unviable, will eventually more
than repay the original $10 billion investment.
Mission-specialist skills will also play a key role in what NASA
hopes to make its next major project: the establishment of a
permanent station in orbit where men and women can work for
weeks or even months at a time.

As a mission specialist, Ride will not pilot the shuttle. On
takeoff and landing, she will sit just behind Challenger's
commander, Bob Crippen, 45, who flew on the initial shuttle
flight and is the first to get a second shuttle mission, and
Co-Pilot Frederick Hauck, 42, a rookie. Monitoring the flood
of data from the instrument panel, Ride will in effect be the
flight engineer. If an emergency occurs, she will suggest
special corrective procedures. But Ride's primary
responsibility will come later when she is set to operate the
shuttle's 50-ft-long mechanical arm, or Remote Manipular System.

On the mission's fifth day, the cherry-picker-like device will
be used to play an intriguing game of extraterrestrial catch
that could be crucial to the shuttle's future. The arm will
hoist a specially designed payload out of the big cargo bay and
toss it overboard; then, after the shuttle swoops around the
temporary satellite for some nine hours, Ride and her unique arm
will try to grapple it back on board. The experiment is a test
of the shuttle's ability to retrieve and repair ailing
satellites; at least one of those now in orbit will get
shuttle-delivered doctoring on a future mission if Ride is
successful.

She ought to be, having spent three years mastering the finicky
Canadian-built contraption. In long sessions with the builders,
she even helped work out corrective procedures in case of a
breakdown. One reason Ride won a seat on the flight is that she
and another crewmate, Mission Specialist John Fabian, 44 are
NASA's premier operators of the arm. Says Abbey: "She and
Fabian are probably equally good."

Ride's origins are as all-American as her achievements. She
grew up in Encino, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, reading a lot
of science fiction as well as Nancy Drew and James Bond. Her
father Dale taught political science at Santa Monica College;
her mother Joyce stayed home with Sally and her younger sister
Karen. Neither parent pushed her in any particular direction,
"except to make sure I studied and brought home the right kind
of grades."

By junior high school, Sally had become good enough in tennis
to achieve national ranking. She also won a partial scholarship
to Westlake, a girls' private school in Los Angeles. There,
largely through the inspiration of a physiology teacher from
U.C.L.A., she caught the science bug; she pursued that interest
in college, first at Swarthmore, then at Stanford, to which she
switched in her sophomore year. After two solid years of
science and math, she turned to the humanities ("I needed a
break from the equations") and fell in love with Shakespeare.
In 1973 she graduated with a B.S. in physics and a B.A. in
English.

In spite of her encouragement from Billie Jean King, Ride
decided to quit tennis and go on to a full-time graduate studies
in astrophysics at Stanford. By 1978 she had a doctorate but
no job. When NASA advertised for the first time in ten years
for astronaut-scientists, she became of one of 8,370 applicants.
After grueling physical and mental examinations, including a
session with two NASA physiatrist who tried to crack her now
celebrated composure, Ride was one of 35 candidates picked, six
of them women. The other female "Ascans" (NASA slang for
astronaut candidates) were equally talented:  Judith Resnik, a
doctor of electrical engineering; Anna Fisher, an M.D.; Kathryn
Sullivan, a Ph.D. in geology; Surgeon Rea Seddon; and
Biochemist Shannon Lucid.

Why was Ride chosen?  She speculates about her strengths:  "A
good educational background and one that showed I could learn
new things readily."  Abbey, who was on the selection panel, has
another explanation:  Ride is a team player. Those who are
determined to do their own thing, he says, "probably wouldn't
be happy here."  Ride clearly was. She enjoyed flights in
NASA's two-seat T-38 trainers so much that she sent on to get
her private pilot's license. She threw herself enthusiastically
into parachute training, scuba diving and even stomach-churning
flights aboard a NASA KC-135 transport whose high-speed arcs
gave the Ascans a brief, exhilarating taste of weightlessness.

At first, some old hands in the brotherhood, like Moonwalker Al
Bean, who instructed the new recruits, doubted that women could
tackle such "male things" as spacecraft and computers. But as
Ride and the other women demonstrated their mettle--actually she
had spent many hours in graduate school at computer
terminals--Bean had a change of heart. The women, he finally
agreed, performed as well as the men. In 1980, encouraged by
the female experience, NASA added two more women to the
astronaut corps.

Though no quarter was given in the training, some sensible
accommodation was made to cope with the differences between the
sexes. To adapt to shorter limbs (Ride is 5 ft. 5 in.), shuttle
seats were built so that they could slide like those in a car.
Optional grooming aids were added to the personal kits of the
astronauts (though Ride has not said whether she will wear
lipstick or powder for the inevitable orbital TV shows).
Included as well are tampons, linked together lest one drift off
when the box is opened. The shuttle's single privy was already
designed with women in mind. Instead of the flexible hose used
by the male-only crews of the old Gemini and Apollo spacecraft,
NASA provided a wide cuplike attachment that fits over the
crotch. A curtain is being added to give Ride some privacy,
though she did not ask for it. Notes Astronaut Mary Cleave, an
environmental engineer:  "Guys don't like to perform vital
functions in front of everybody either."

NASA doctors do not expect any special medical problems with
Ride or any other woman in space. Says Dr. Sam Poole, the
Johnson Space Center's medical chief:  "I don't think women will
respond any differently from men."  Though anecdotal evidence
suggests that women are more susceptible to motion sickness,
none of the spinning tests conducted by NASA has supported the
theory. Nor are the space agency's doctors particularly worried
about the reportedly greater inclination of women toward the
bends. Doctors say that any problems can be easily averted by
longer prebreathing sessions before and after a space walk.

Like her sister astronauts, Ride has mostly been treated like
one of the guys. Says she:  "Crip won't even open a door for
me any more." Ever since the mission team selection was
announced 14 months ago, Ride and her crewmates have spent most
of their waking hours together. The fifth member of the group,
Norman Thagard, 39, another mission specialist, was added only
last December. As a physician, he will investigate a nagging
difficult of space travel: the initial queasiness, or "space
adaptation syndrome," that seems to afflict about 50% of all
astronauts in their first few days of weightlessness. The
Challenger team members share an office at the Johnson Space
Center. They practice endlessly in the shuttle cockpit
simulator, rehearsing every conceivable facet of the mission,
including possible emergencies. They have come to be as
close-knit as a family, even to the extent of protecting Ride
from an overly inquisitive press. When she quietly married
fellow Astronaut Steve Hawley last July (he will fly on the
twelfth shuttle with Resnik), her Challenger comrades respected
her wish to keep her private life private.

Ride has earned her colleagues' trust and high regard. Says
Crippen, who as skipper had veto power over all the crew
choices: "You like people who stay calm under duress. And Sally
can do that. She hit all the squares."  Her sister, who has
become a Presbyterian minister, calls her a tough, no-nonsense
competitor:  "Sally will wipe you out every time."  Adds Molly
Tyson, an old Stanford roommate: "I've never seen Sally trip,
on or off the court, physically or intellectually."

With such displays of combativeness and composure under
pressure, it would seem that the shuttle program is in good
hands, whether they are male or female.

--By Frederic Golden. Reported by Sam Allis/Houston and Jerry
Hannifin/Washington