June 18: Sally Ride Became the First American Woman in Space

On June 18, 1983, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying mission specialist Dr. Sally Ride. Notably, this mission was one that would go down as a leap for women across the world. At 32 years old, Ride became the first American woman to travel to space, and at the time, the youngest American astronaut ever to do so. The moment was watched by millions, celebrated across the country, and felt like a door previously closed had opened for an entire generation of girls and young women. Interestingly, Sally Ride herself had complicated feelings about the weight of that symbolism.

The physicist who almost didn't apply

Sally Ride was not an astronaut who had dreamed of space from childhood. She was a Stanford PhD student specializing in free electron lasers and X-ray astrophysics when, in 1977, she saw a newspaper advertisement placed by NASA in her campus paper. NASA was recruiting its first new class of astronauts since the Apollo era, and for the first time in the agency's history, women were explicitly invited to apply.

Ride applied. Out of 8,000 applicants, she was one of six women selected, joining a class that also included the first Black, Asian American, and Latino astronauts in NASA history.

She spent six years as an astronaut before her first flight, training in everything from spacewalking to robotics. She became particularly skilled with the Shuttle's robotic arm (the Canadarm) and was assigned the task of operating it during the STS-7 mission to deploy and retrieve satellites. Her technical role on the mission was genuine and demanding, not ceremonial.

After NASA

What Ride did after leaving NASA is, in some ways, even more interesting than her spaceflights. She served on both the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board following the 2003 Columbia disaster. Ride was the only person to serve on both panels, a reflection of the trust and respect she had earned within the scientific and aerospace communities. She returned to academia, becoming a physics professor at UC San Diego, and founded Sally Ride Science, an organization dedicated to creating science programs and materials for young students, with a particular emphasis on encouraging girls to stay engaged with STEM at the ages when research shows they most commonly disengage.

Ride was deeply private about her personal life and notoriously uncomfortable with the celebrity that her historic flight had brought her. She declined most offers of fame and consistently redirected attention toward the science rather than the symbolism. When she died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, her obituary revealed that she had been in a 27-year relationship with her partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, making her the first known LGBTQ+ astronaut. Her family's decision to include this in her obituary was itself a statement and a meaningful act, expanding the groups she had always represented.

Why she still matters

Sally Ride's significance is, in some ways, unparalleled. Firstly, she mattered as the first American woman in space broke a barrier that had been in place for 22 years of American human spaceflight, and the visibility of that moment reached millions of young people who saw themselves in her. She also mattered as a physicist who earned her seat on the basis of genuine technical skill and who continued serious scientific work for the rest of her life. Importantly, she mattered as an advocate. Ride was someone who understood that breaking one barrier wasn't enough, and who spent decades working to ensure that the next generation of scientists would have fewer barriers to break in the first place.