Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Today, King thinks that the fallout from her outing “probably scared the hell out of Sally. That probably put her more into her shell.” But Sally never discussed it with her—not then, not later. And she never brought up the subject in any form with Steve. They were a couple now, like any other couple, with the often independent orbits of two very focused astronauts. Many mornings, they set off in opposite directions on their individual assignments, Sally for long weeks to Canada to work on the robot arm and Steve to Florida to work at the Cape. Both had the same goal: to get on a crew and fly. Which meant getting George Abbey to select them. They went about their work with renewed determination.

  “One of the things Sally and I did was figure out pretty early on, that it was going to be a lot more important to spend time learning shuttle software than it was solving problems in astrophysics. And I don’t recall him ever saying anything, but I believe that was one of George’s tests—who are the people who are going to come in and be committed to the program?”

  The good news was, there was finally a program.

  BACK IN SPACE

  On December 29, 1980, Columbia was rolled out to the pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The gleaming white spaceship, mated to its matching fuel tank and sleek solid rocket boosters, would launch the first American astronaut in six years. The entire space community seemed to shift into a faster pace to prepare for this largely experimental bundle of aeronautical wizardry. Most of the hardware had never been tested as an entity, real-time. The orbiter had never flown into space, either with or without a human. No one had ever launched on solid rocket motors, which, once ignited, could not be turned off.

  When I visited Houston in March 1981, NASA was abuzz. And a nation that had lost interest in space travel was revving up for the journey. Ronald Reagan had just been swept into the White House and took full advantage of the shuttle program he inherited, yoking his optimism and support to the promise of a new adventure. That’s when I first met and first interviewed Sally, by then sporting layers of dark brown permed curls. I asked what she expected to see in space. “A view of the universe out in front of you,” she said. Astrophysics, beyond the lab. Three years in training had certainly improved the essay she’d written as an applicant.

  I also had my first encounter with John Young and Bob Crippen, the older-school astronauts who would be flying STS-1 (for Space Transportation System-first flight) in April. Young, the “astronaut’s astronaut,” a veteran space traveler, was also head of the Astronaut Office, but his economical way with words and his reticent manner at the Monday morning meetings (always looking down at his papers), spawned a favorite TFNG joke: “Does anyone know the color of John’s eyes?” When Mike Coats, who ascended to become director of JSC after three shuttle flights, tells me this, he adds, laughing, “I still don’t!”

  Young’s pilot, known to all as “Crip,” was a strikingly handsome Navy captain and test pilot who’d been waiting more than a dozen years for his first flight in space. Unwaveringly modest and exceptionally competent, Crip disavowed any possibility that flying the first shuttle would make him a hero. “What if it does?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said, smiling, with no intention of speculating. “What if it does?”

  One month later, on April 12, 1981, from my camera position three miles away, I watched them shoot to the sky with an ear-splitting thrust of power and light that not only dazzled my eyes but pounded on my chest, with waves of energy emanating from the pad. “Go, baby, go!” urged Gene Cernan on ABC News, as the most complicated vehicle in human history rose slowly from the pad, then streaked into orbit to put NASA back in business. Two days later, I helped anchor the coverage as Columbia dropped out of the sky with a double sonic boom and glided to a safe landing in the California desert. Young and Crippen were the nation’s new heroes.

  Sally had seen the launch from the backseat of a T-38. Columbia’s success brought her one launch closer to her own. But when?

  CAPCOM

  That summer, she edged even closer. After nearly three years at NASA, having moved from the classroom to the simulator, from a parachute drop in Oklahoma to “flying” the robot arm in Toronto, Sally Ride was named a CapCom (Capsule Communicator, a relic of the lunar age when spacecraft were little capsules holding human cargo) for the second shuttle mission, scheduled for that fall. It was, Sally said, “a really good assignment, probably the best job in the astronaut office next to flying.” Along with a round-the-clock team of other astronauts, she would serve as the interface between the crew—commander Joe Engle and pilot Dick Truly—and the flight director in Mission Control. By ancient decree, astronauts in space speak only with other astronauts on the ground. It was a prestigious job in prime time, often the fast track to a crew assignment, and Sally was chosen, in large part, because of her expertise with the robot arm, which would be flown for the first time on STS-2. “I needed a CapCom who was the right person, because that was a big test,” pilot Dick Truly tells me. She would need to know every pitch and yaw of the unwieldy crane, to talk the crew through any anomalies and direct them to solutions.

  Sally trained for the next three months, in hundreds of full-blown simulations with the crew and the entire flight team. “I’m very serious about what I’m doing,” she told me later. “If I’m given a job or assignment, I feel like I need to do the best job I can. And part of that is probably just pride. I have a lot of pride in what I do, and I don’t like to appear stupid. So I work very hard to avoid appearing stupid.”

  When Columbia reached orbit on November 12, 1981, she talked Engle and Truly through every maneuver, as familiar with the camera on the elbow of the robot arm as with the tendons of her own wrist. For the first time, a female voice was the legendary “Houston” of space travel. For the first time, a female astronaut sat at the console in the glassed-in room with its terraced rows of monitors and king-sized, wall-mounted patches commemorating the fabled flights to the Moon and around Earth, all controlled from that room. Sally was smooth and steady and spoke the native language. “After the RMS PRCS test, we need you to auto maneuver back to minus ZLV per the CAP, and I think that’s per page 4-42 of the CAP,” she said, casually. When an onboard system malfunctioned, meaning the mission had to be cut short, it was Sally who delivered the news, calmly and precisely, to the disappointed crew. Her poise softened the blow, and her good humor punctuated the rest of the trip. As Truly and commander Joe Engle tumbled around in weightlessness like porpoises, beaming down eye-popping images of Earth and the robot arm as it flexed its electromechanical bicep, Sally radioed back, “Super! When do I get my turn?” Carpe diem. Thirty-four astronauts must have wished that they, too, could put in their bids through a nationally televised microphone.

  Four months later, Sally served as a CapCom for the third shuttle mission. Once again, hers was a calm and very knowledgeable voice, the kind you’d want with you on a risky mission.

  In an interview several years earlier, she had bubbled over with enthusiasm about her training, recognizing that once Columbia landed safely from its maiden voyage, and once NASA felt comfortable with the shuttle’s operations, the floodgates would open. Now that it had launched and landed three times, with no major setbacks, the crews for future flights would start to be named. The reporter teased her with the possibility of flying—and fame.

  “I can’t wait to get up,” she told him. “We’re all eager for the first flight to get up and get off the ground. And eager to each get up ourselves. As far as being the first American woman goes, that doesn’t mean all that much to me.”

  “But you wouldn’t mind making history that way, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  5

  *

  FIRST

  APRIL 1982–JUNE 1983

  Roadside sign, Cocoa Beach, Florida, June 18, 1983.

  Lynn Sherr: Do you feel under any pressure as America’s first female astronaut?

  Sally Ride: I do feel that there’s some pressure fo
r me not to mess up.

  —Preflight interview, 1983

  GET READY …

  In early 1982, with three shuttle missions completed and another three crews in training—all comprised of astronauts who’d been with NASA since the 1960s—George Abbey and Chief Astronaut John Young were eager to get the Thirty-five New Guys into space. After four years, they weren’t so new anymore; another class had joined in 1980, adding two more women and two minority men to the growing rainbow coalition. It was time to start showing off NASA’s fresh faces.

  They began at the top, naming Bob Crippen, the STS-1 pilot, to command the seventh shuttle mission, and Dick Truly, just back from STS-2, to command the eighth. Two seasoned and respected career pilots were being entrusted with the TFNG’s rookie flights. Truly, who would later become the first astronaut to serve as NASA Administrator, recalls a meeting with Abbey and Chris Kraft, where “they told us that NASA wanted to fly a woman on seven and an African American on eight. So we started this conversation on how to round out the crews. And they had some ideas, but they took our input too.” Truly says that when it came to the women, “it very quickly became a conversation about Sally and Judy [Resnik]. Everybody just thought that they were the top of the heap. None of this was negative about the other women. It was just about who was best.”

  Crippen says the idea of having a woman on the crew was Abbey’s, and that he agreed wholeheartedly. And while “all six females in that group were outstanding, both George and I thought Sally ought to be the first one. I had significant input.” He says there were many reasons Sally appealed to him: “Technically, that we’d be using the [robot] arm a lot, and she was one of the experts. And a great deal of it was Sally’s personality: she really did work very well with everybody I saw her come in contact with. When you’re putting together a crew, you want to have a group that is compatible.” Crippen points out that compatibility is critical in a mission that lasts for a week. “You’re working very closely together, and if anybody gets on anybody else’s nerves, it’s not efficient. Also, you’re training together for a year, just constantly together, much more than you are with your family. And if there are things that rub people wrong, it kind of festers and grows, and you don’t want that in a space flight crew.”

  Crippen was also taken with Sally’s performance as CapCom. “You like people who stay calm under duress. And Sally can do that. She hit all the squares.”

  George Abbey says John Young, as head of the Astronaut Office, “was part of all this too. John and I talked over all the candidates for the STS-7 flight that would be well suited for the mission, both men and women.” Abbey came up with the names. “Sally was on my list,” he recalls, meaning she was his first choice among the women from the beginning. “She clearly was the best RMS [remote arm] operator we had.” When I first interviewed Abbey back in 1983, right after Sally was chosen, he also told me, grinning at his own political correctness, “She fits the mold that we’re looking for as far as crewman … or crewpersons … are concerned.”

  Abbey prided himself on tracking the candidates closely. “I felt I had a good idea who were the best qualified,” he says. “I said who the STS-7 crew ought to be, and what did he think of it? And in the end John [Young] and I were in agreement on the crew selected.”

  When Abbey took the list to JSC director Chris Kraft, Abbey says Kraft wanted to discuss all the female candidates, and wondered why Abbey hadn’t selected Anna Fisher to fly first. “He thought Anna was pretty well qualified and could do the job,” Abbey tells me. “So I had to defend Sally.” Abbey says he regularly had to defend all the crew members, and that Kraft “didn’t necessarily agree with me all the time, but as long as I could make a good case and argue it, I usually won.” With Sally, he says, “I went over her record and what she’d done and how other people rated her and her proficiency and her ability to work well with others. So we discussed it and he finally agreed.”

  Kraft, who declined several times, without explanation, to be interviewed for this book, took the list to Headquarters, in DC, and “they went with our judgment,” Abbey says. “I think they were pleased that we had selected a woman.”

  The woman in question got the electrifying news early Monday morning, April 19, 1982. Usually, the entire crew was summoned to Abbey’s office—the big corner suite on the eighth floor, with huge windows overlooking the campus—and told together. Receiving the mysterious phone call and bumping into others as you walked over to Building 1 was a stomach-churning ritual. That morning, it was a solo act. A secretary called Sally just before the weekly astronauts’ meeting, saying that Abbey wanted to see her. Sally speculated—hoped—she knew why. She’d been wondering about the possibility all weekend, having been told, without explanation, to report back to Houston from a brief vacation at Disneyland with Steve. Now she prepared for a guessing game with (her term) the “man of few words.”

  “He basically said, ‘Um, how do you like the job you’ve got now?’ I said, ‘Well, what is my job?’ He said, ‘We thought that maybe you enjoyed what you were doing so much that maybe you wouldn’t want to fly on a crew.’ ”

  “George wanted to tell me first,” she later said, “to tell me that this was kind of a big deal because I was going to be the first woman to go up, the first woman assigned to a crew. He wanted to make sure that I was comfortable with that. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to do that.

  “After I met with him, he took me up to Dr. Kraft’s office [on the ninth floor], and Dr. Kraft talked with me about the implications of being the first woman. He reminded me that I would get a lot of press attention and asked if I was ready for that. His message was just, ‘Let us know when you need help; we’re here to support you in any way and can offer whatever help you need.’ It was a very reassuring message, coming from the head of the space center.”

  Both Kraft and Abbey had seen the consequences of celebrity. After the “determinedly modest” Neil Armstrong became the first of our species on the Moon, the enormity of his accomplishment both expanded and constricted his life, making it impossible to walk down the street like any other American. They wanted, Abbey tells me, “to make sure Sally understood what she was getting into.” She said she thought she did, which was either a bold expression of confidence or an innocent misreading of the possibilities. How could she possibly have understood the magnitude, the impact, the craziness? The First was the name everyone would know. The First would get the headlines, the speaking fees, the history books. The expectations. How can you grasp what it all means ahead of time? And even if you do, how do you say no to the brass ring?

  Back in Abbey’s office, the rest of the crew was notified. Other than Crippen, STS-7 was the first mission comprised entirely of Sally’s classmates. The pilot was Frederick (Rick) Hauck, a third-generation Naval officer and Vietnam vet, who had warmed my heart during an early interview by articulating his love of flying: “I like the freedom. If you want to make the world turn upside down, you just push the stick.” John Fabian, a tall, former aeronautics professor at the US Air Force Academy, an Air Force colonel, and at forty-three the oldest of the New Guys, would serve as mission specialist, like Sally. He was also an expert on the robot arm. A third mission specialist, physician and US Marine and naval aviator Norm Thagard, would be added later, to help deal with the growing problem of space adaptation syndrome, or SAS, NASA’s euphemism for the often debilitating bouts of space sickness. They were, George Abbey said, “a group of people who could take on the mission and complement each other.”

  And they were, as Crip noticed approvingly, widely known as “ ‘Sally Ride and the others,’ which was just right for us!” For a bunch of reserved military guys, it was perfect.

  Sally was elated. She had not only beaten out more than eight thousand applicants to get to NASA in the first place, she had now floated to the top of an elite group of six. But she was forced to sit on the news for several hours until the public, and the astronaut corps, were clued
in. NASA buried the lede by announcing crews for three new shuttle missions—STS-7, with Sally; STS-8, with Guion (Guy) Bluford, the first African American; and STS-9, a joint mission with the European Space Agency. Newspaper headlines predictably singled out Sally and Guy: a woman and a black were going into space! Bluford generated far less excitement. His gender trumped his ethnicity—the world was used to male astronauts—and besides, he tells me, “I had an extensive flying background in high performance jet aircraft and lots of aerospace engineering experience.” The unknown was the female factor: how to support a woman “in a male-dominated cramped spaceflight environment. And no one knew how well a female was going to perform on orbit.” In short, Bluford recalls, “The press was more interested in the unique difference of male versus female in space than in black versus white on orbit.”

  To say the least.

  Some five hundred reporters immediately requested private interviews with Sally, all of which were declined. NASA followed standard procedure with a full-crew press conference just over a week later, where Sally, looking younger than her thirty-one years and deceptively demure in a blue blouse with puffy sleeves, with two delicate gold chains ringing her neck, smiled charitably when Crippen introduced her as “undoubtedly the prettiest member of the crew.” Then she described two experiments the flight would be carrying and responded patiently to questions from a reasonably polite press corps. (I say that with full objectivity. I was in California covering Jerry Brown’s unsuccessful US Senate campaign and saved my formal questions for another time.)