Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  “She would do the simulation over and over again,” explains Jim Middleton, the chief engineer on the Canadarm program who worked with Sally during her trips to Toronto for nearly five years. “We’d say, ‘Sally, do you want to take a rest?’ And she’d say, ‘No, I will continue to do this until I get it done.’ ” From eight thirty in the morning until nine at night, Sally stayed at the controls, communicating with Middleton by headphone as she worked the problem, throwing switches and maneuvering two hand controllers—rotating one while moving the other up or down, left or right, in or out—to put the arm through its paces. I tried it myself recently—the simulator version in Houston—and discovered the fine coordination needed to monitor all the movements through a series of screens and two sets of windows—one at eye level, one overhead—as well as some instruments. As astronaut Bob Crippen, who also trained on the arm, put it, “You have to integrate all that in your head to maneuver the arm correctly.” They call it “flying the arm,” because you make it move the way you pilot a plane. “It’s a skill that you wouldn’t find normally,” Middleton says, “the ability to do the same thing over and over again and repeat it exactly—like a race car driver doing laps, hold the exact time within hundredths of a second. Sally loved perfection. She wanted things to be right.”

  Astronaut John Fabian, who worked on the arm with Sally, likened it to a video game. He says her experience as a tennis player clearly made a difference. “She had excellent reflexes, and was used to being in a high pressure dynamic situation. I think she devoured every moment of it.”

  “I remember her coming home from practicing with the robot arm,” Bill Colson says. “And she observed with fascination that she was really good at it.” He says she liked that “she was now ‘competing’ with pilots who are known for their hand-eye coordination, and she was actually doing better than those guys, and it was kind of surprising.”

  Sally’s work with the arm would play an important role in her NASA career. But it was only part of the picture.

  To simulate weightlessness, she trained underwater, in scuba gear. Only NASA could turn a swimming pool into an acronym—the Water Environment Training Facility, or WETF (pronounced WET-eff).

  For a more realistic experience, Sally and the TFNGs flew in the KC-135 cargo plane known by everyone as “the Vomit Comet,” for its stomach-dropping, parabolic loops. She learned, in the plane’s thirty-second falls, how not to maneuver. “Your first instinct is to try to swim, but you can’t!” Sally said. “You just hang there and flail.” Far better, she learned, was to push off the sides. “She’d come home exhausted,” Bill Colson remembers, “but she didn’t get airsick. She thought being weightless was nice.”

  Back on Earth, she dove into training manuals, familiarized herself with the 1,800 switches and circuit breakers on the orbiter’s control panel, traveled to colleges and other educational centers to wave the flag for NASA. The new dresses in Sally’s closet reflected the number of speeches she had to make. And despite her good intentions to keep up with her astrophysics studies, she found herself writing fewer and fewer papers. “I haven’t been doing as much research as I would like to, because I’m so fascinated by the astronaut program!” she said. The intensity was incessant. Rhea Seddon said it was “like a year of drinking through a fire hose.”

  It was also their idea of fun.

  HAPPY HOURS, HAPPY DAYS

  Friday nights meant Happy Hour at the Outpost Bar. Some of the married astronauts hosted regular parties at home, with a keg of beer bought from retired astronaut Alan Shepard’s Coors’ distributorship. When Sally found out that Joseph Coors had opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, she stopped drinking the beer. But she went to the parties. Sally and Bill had couples over from time to time, but saw them more often on the volleyball court, where Bill had brought his impressive skill to form an astronauts’ team. Sally was also running about twenty to thirty miles a week, mostly out the back gate of the space center, then winding along its northern perimeter. And some nights, just for fun, she would join the other flight-crazed astronauts driving their cars along a quiet road in perfect T-38 flight formation.

  They were redefining the macho moxie for a new age. Sally already had the unruffled manner, the steely poise. The Ride restraint meshed perfectly with the stoic NASA ethic, and the little girl who loved to ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland belonged on a rocket. Acquiring the finishing touches seemed to come naturally. Facts were data points, ideas were bullet points, paragraphs were checklists, words were minimal, feelings unmentioned. Molly Tyson, with whom Sally had resurrected a friendship—just a friendship, for a few more years—and who was working on a project in Houston, says, Sally “knew what to do to fit in. She understood how to read an environment, understood what it took to be first.” Her appearance had changed, Tyson says. Her old friend was suddenly wearing aviator shades and a leather jacket, classic symbols of laconic bravery.

  Sally had also learned that danger was never acknowledged by astronauts. For outsiders like me, it was a tricky concept, and sometimes I forgot the rules. Like the time I was on the air with moonwalker Gene Cernan during one of our ABC News broadcasts. As we counted down to the potentially dodgy first nighttime shuttle launch, I slipped and uttered the word fear. Cernan was only half teasing when he corrected me, saying, “Astronauts are never frightened, Lynn. A little apprehensive at times, but never frightened.”

  The sentiment was usually masked with a favorite NASA word—“interesting,” as in “That landing was interesting” (when they’d nearly crashed), or “That was an interesting day” (after their spacecraft was stuck by lightning thirty-six seconds after liftoff). “Interesting” also functioned as an all-purpose descriptive. I teased Sally—apparently more effectively than I’d realized—about picking up the patois. In an audio diary that she recorded after her flight, she described a bizarre (and very formal) meeting about peaceful uses of Space in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia (which had no space program) with some very uptight Iron Curtain comrades, as “a very, very [pause, chuckle] interesting meeting.” She then added, with another laugh, “As Lynn says, I use that word when I don’t know how to describe something!” Listening in nearly thirty years later, I was amused that my point had been taken.

  But the language merely reflected their mind-set.

  “We all picked it up,” explains Marsha Ivins, who worked with NASA for many years before joining the third group of shuttle astronauts in 1984. “It helps you deal with stuff when it is a big deal. You just sort of say, ‘We’re not going to get excited about anything,’ and there are plenty of times when you’re well served by it. When things start coming apart, you have to be cool. That’s just an operations mode.” Ellen Baker, a flight surgeon who also became a member of the astronaut class of 1984, says, “It’s an important personal quality, to be able to maintain rational, logical thought in the face of off-nominal, potential dangerous situations or environments. You don’t want to be distracted by fear and anxiety when you have a job to do. You have to be able to be a clear thinker and compartmentalize well enough to do your job without being scared.”

  For Sally, compartmentalizing was second nature. Cool was how she had learned to function on the tennis court. Some of the other qualities that had served her since childhood simply needed honing. Susan Okie calls it the “detached control” that got her through high stress situations, “the characteristic psychic camouflage that has always made her an elusive character.”

  It may also have been a reaction to the prying eyes of the press. In the code of the corps, questions about attitudes and ideas were not welcome; you never knew how the information might be used. Just as doctors might find a medical condition that kept you from flying, so could journalists print an off-the-cuff comment that sent you to the bottom of the list.

  “NASA believes that the organization—and especially the astronauts—must always appear in a positive light to the American public and to Congress,” writes Dr. Patricia Santy,
a psychiatrist who served as a NASA flight surgeon for Sally and other women from 1984 to 1991. Management, she says, believes “that openness about any problems—particularly emotional or behavioral ones—will erode their public support. Anything considered to be potentially ‘damaging’ to the agency must be carefully controlled or minimized to circumvent the possibility that funding might be cut.”

  Taken to its extreme, it meant no one besides an astronaut was to be trusted.

  And since the public saw astronauts as “walking wonders,” according to another consulting psychiatrist, they did their best to comply. There is a story that rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, who led the creation and production of Germany’s deadly V-2 during World War II and then, transferring his allegiance, spearheaded development of the rocket that got US astronauts to the Moon, once was asked to describe how he felt during the countdowns for NASA’s earliest launches, the robotic ones that failed so often. “Before the blastoff,” he is reported to have said, “you chew your fingers. After the blastoff you talk briefly with newsmen and say, ‘There was never any doubt.’ ”

  As the veteran of five shuttle flights tells me, “We just were all dedicated to the idea that we wanted to take this thing that’s really hard and make it look really easy. You know,” he says, winking ostentatiously and putting two thumbs up. “Being around other people like that tends to reinforce it.”

  But if you weren’t like that, it wasn’t easy.

  “I didn’t really fit in,” says Bill Colson, who found his physics research a sorry match for conversations about T-38 aerobatics. “I had nothing to offer. Sally talked about the other astronauts as if they were gods, and I was willing to take a supportive role, but I wasn’t good at being a fan. I felt out of place more and more.”

  Bill also felt awkward about his knowledge of Sally’s romance with Molly at a notoriously homophobic agency. Long before “Don’t ask, don’t tell” gave the US military permission to stick its head in the sand, NASA sent out vibes that sounded more like, “Don’t be.” Around that time, one gay NASA couple (not astronauts) reportedly purchased separate houses on different streets that backed up to each other, rather than risk being found out at the office. Whether Sally or any of her colleagues knew about such subterfuge is unknown. But as usual, her close friends protected her, entirely unasked.

  “I didn’t talk about her past when we were at Stanford, and I wasn’t going to talk about it then,” Bill says. “She never told me, Don’t tell anybody about her and Molly. But I might have been a pretty serious hazard.” Molly Tyson also worried “that my past relationship with her is a huge liability given the astronauts’ concerns about appearances.” But as damaging as the information might have been to Sally’s career, she didn’t seem to care. Her past was past, and never mentioned. If she was anxious then that NASA might discover her gay history, she didn’t utter a word to either Molly or Bill.

  She did, however, tell Bill that she wanted to live alone. In January 1979, he moved out. It had been a long relationship with many shared intimacies, and they would remain friends and intermittent academic partners, writing a number of physics papers together. But as Colson admits, echoing the thoughts of John Tompkins before him, “Neither of us knew how to talk about feelings. That probably was a fatal thing.”

  Sally wasn’t alone for long.

  She briefly dated fellow AsCan Robert “Hoot” Gibson, a thirty-two-year-old Navy test pilot with a rakish blond moustache and an insatiable passion for airplanes. “Sally was just as sweet as she could be,” he says fondly. “Really fun to be with, really fun to fly with, tolerated all of our coarse boy jokes, and all of that stuff. But I never heard Sally tell a sleazy joke.” He also admired her athleticism. “She was probably one of the best natural athletes NASA ever had. If you went running with Sally, you’d better be ready for a good run. We could go fly together in a T-38 and run around the country. It was pretty cool.”

  And never so cool as that February, when Gibson convinced the bosses to let him lead a group of pilots and mission specialists to observe the total eclipse of the sun over Montana. It was a glorious boondoggle, disguised as a scientific mission. With Sally in his backseat, along with two other crews, they flew their T-38s north on their grand excursion and parked in the local Air Force base. The next day, they took off, got up to 39,000 feet and raced along as the Moon started to pass in front of the Sun. Traveling at nine-tenths the speed of sound, they got an unparalleled, aerial view of the totality—when the Sun is completely blacked out—for four minutes and ten seconds, nearly two minutes longer than anyone on the ground. The photographs were fabulous; the view out the canopy, even better. Then they flew home past Mount Rushmore.

  Sally was exactly where she wanted to be: flying a slick jet, sharing the sky with a new best (boy)friend, looking straight into a solar eclipse, wearing a made-for-swaggering flight suit and hip bomber jacket as she breathed rare air in the company of five colleagues with The Perfect Stuff, at least for that moment in her life. “Sally came into the program fairly casually,” Gibson says, “but jumped into it heart and soul. It became a passion and an obsession with her. And she obviously totally embraced it and she lived and breathed space shuttles and the space program.”

  Sally never found the words to express her adoration for what she was doing. “I just love my job,” was the best she could say.

  In August 1979, just a year after she’d come to Houston, she was called to a meeting with the other TFNGs. They’d all done so well, they were told, their two-year training period had been cut in half and they no long needed to append “candidate” to their title. Officially, they were now astronauts, proud owners of the silver pin with the shining star atop three trajectories, encircled by the ellipse of orbit. More practically, it meant that thirty-five men and women were now eligible to be assigned to a crew.

  STEVE

  Steve Hawley, a lanky, redheaded astronomer from Kansas, became one of the TFNGs while doing a postdoc at an observatory in Chile. When he got to NASA, he thought Sally was cute, his term, and that they had a lot in common. He especially remembered reading an interview she’d done: “And it struck me that she’d been asked the same question I’d been asked, and answered the same way: ‘Why would you do this? Give up a promising career?’ And her answer was word for word what I’d said, ‘Because it’s your basic once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’ ” Hey, Steve thought, she sounds like someone I’d like to know.

  But Sally was living with Bill at the time, and when they split up, she started dating Hoot. “So it didn’t seem like Bill leaving town was helping that much,” Steve tells me. He is very droll.

  Sally and Steve became friends. And when she stopped seeing Hoot, they got together. A group of TFNGs were going tubing on the nearby Guadalupe River for the weekend. “I had decided that I wasn’t going to go,” Steve says. “And the day before everyone was to leave, I was talking to her and she said, ‘Why don’t you come along?’ And I decided I would. So I did. And I think that may have been before we were officially a couple, but the first time I thought maybe there’s a chance.”

  “Steve was probably my best friend in that group of thirty-five, long before we started dating,” Sally said much later. “We had a lot in common in our backgrounds: science, astronomy, a love of the stars, a love of the planets, a love of the space program.” And a colossal interest in watching any version of Star Trek and any game with a ball on TV. In Steve, Sally found a sports fan of equal caliber. They were also both devoted to practical jokes and quick witticisms. Like Steve’s comment when he first met his classmates and found himself intimidated by the constant round of military macho as they introduced themselves—“attack pilot in the Navy,” “attack pilot in the Air Force.” When Steve’s turn came, he stood up and identified himself as an “attack astronomer.” That became “A-squared,” his office nickname, which is how Sally would always refer to him in her notes.

  Their friendship grew. They ran together, they w
orked out at the gym together (in their NASA-supplied blue shorts and tees with the meandering space agency logo that everyone called “the worm”), they discussed their assignments together. And they were equally at home in the land of reserved emotions. “We both have the same general personality, although she was a bit more extreme in terms of being secretive,” Steve tells me. “I’ve never really talked about my personal life, but I can speak volumes compared to her.” Steve zeroes in on their lack of communication. “She was a lot like I am in the sense that, when she was worried or upset, she would just be quiet. And that’s what I do. So there were lots of time when we wouldn’t talk about stuff.” By the time they moved in together, in the summer of 1981, they had expressed their mutual love, in the muted manner that then represented Sally’s best effort: “I might say that I’m in love with you,” is how Steve recalls she said it. He told her the same. They considered themselves engaged. And continued to guard their privacy.

  Steve remembers telling Hoot Gibson about their new living arrangement while they were jogging one day in July. “I had cleverly chosen the date of Charles and Diana’s wedding to do it,” he tells me, “so that no one would notice.” The marriage of the British royals that summer was certainly the biggest news of the day. That’s where I was on assignment when Sally and Steve set up housekeeping in Houston, which is my excuse for missing the scoop.

  But another celebrity event, earlier that year, may have triggered a more significant reaction in Sally. In May 1981, Billie Jean King—Sally’s old friend and role model from tennis camp, and the biggest female tennis star in the world—held a press conference to announce that she was being sued for palimony by her former secretary, Marilyn Barnett. “I was outed,” King tells me, still angry at being forced to announce her sexuality publicly, before she had come to terms with it personally. And while she was still married. At a time of widespread homophobia, she also saw her endorsements and sponsorships disappear in a flash. “I lost all my money overnight, started my life over at thirty-eight,” she says.