Dale Gardner, Jetpack-Flying Astronaut Who Salvaged Satellites

NASA astronaut Dale Gardner holds up a "For Sale" sign in a nod to the malfunctioning satellites he and Joe Allen salvaged during space shuttle Discovery's STS-51A mission in 1984.

Scott Carpenter, One of the Original Seven Astronauts

Associated Press

President John F. Kennedy congratulates the astronaut Scott Carpenter in the Oval Office at the White House after his three-orbit flight around the earth. With them are Carpenter's wife at the time, Rene, and their children. More Photos »

Ride, Sally, ride

Sally Ride: 1951-2012:American Woman Who Shattered Space Ceiling

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.