TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83cappeo.1

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Sally's Joy Ride into the Sky

June 13, 1983

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.a  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