Dr. Ride, a physicist who was accepted into the space program in 1978
after she answered a newspaper ad for astronauts, flew on the shuttle
Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984. At 32, she
was also the youngest American in space. She later became the only person to sit on both panels investigating the
catastrophic shuttle accidents that killed all astronauts on board —
the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia crash in 2003.
Dr. Ride was finishing studies at Stanford University — she had degrees in
physics and astrophysics (and also English) — and looking for a job
when she saw NASA’s advertisement. She looked at the qualifications and
said, “I’m one of those people,” she told The New York Times in 1982. She applied, and made the cut. “The women’s movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming,” she said.
How many other astronauts have degrees in English?
She received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English in 1973 (her
specialty was Shakespeare), a master’s degree in physics in 1975 and a
Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1978, all from Stanford. Her graduate work
involved X-ray astronomy and free-electron lasers.
Dr. Ride told interviewers that what drove her was not the desire to become famous or to make history as the first woman in space. All she wanted to do was fly, she said, to soar into space, float around weightless inside the shuttle, look out at the heavens and gaze back at Earth. In photographs of her afloat in the spaceship, she was grinning, as if she had at long last reached the place she was meant to be.
Ride, Sally, ride.
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