by Lynn Sherr
No, she had never thought about being an astronaut as a child. No, she didn’t yet have any advice for other would-be female astronauts. Yes, she was honored to be offered “the experience of a lifetime.” This from a reporter who wondered how it felt to become “a footnote in history, and a trivia question forever.” “Gosh, that’s quite an honor!” Sally quipped, laughing amiably at the attempt to rile her. When another tried the oblique approach—“I’m sure you’ve been asked, many times, how it feels to be the first woman astronaut. How does it feel to be asked that question?”—she parried, good-naturedly, “I’ve also been asked, many times, how it feels to be asked that question! I think I’m going to get real tired of being asked that question, but probably not as tired as these three [her crewmates] are about being asked how it feels to fly with me!”
The rules of the game were obvious: the media needed a headline and tried valiantly to provoke a juicy response; Sally, determined to be seen as just another dedicated astronaut in the buttoned-down bureaucracy, kept her answers brief, technocentric and unquotable.
Someone brought up the “personal hygiene” issue—“How do you work around that, do you become one of the guys?”—which Sally, laughing, deftly tossed to her commander. “There’s no doubt about it,” Crippen agreed, flashing his own got-it-covered grin, “the orbiter is not that big of a vehicle and there’s not that much privacy. But I’m sure we’ll work it out to everybody’s satisfaction.” He noted that the shuttle had been designed to accommodate both men and women, and that only one modification—“the commode”—had been required. Still, “We’re going to become very familiar with one another over the next year or so!”
The bodily waste issue was more than timely. Sally was following closely the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would go down to defeat two months later thanks, in part, to the fuss kicked up by Phyllis Schlafly over the specter of unisex restrooms. You know, like the ones in airplanes. Or in your home. A political cartoon published after Sally’s appointment to STS-7 showed Schlafly buttonholing a NASA engineer and demanding, “But will there be separate bathrooms?!”
The same themes would chase Sally over the next fourteen months as the press and the public tried to penetrate the not very accessible mind of this most accomplished, most private person in this most unique situation: how did it feel to be a woman with all those men? How did being a woman change the dynamic of the all-male crew? What was it like to be a female astronaut? How many ways could the same query be posed? NASA largely protected her with an airtight training schedule that left little room for idle chatter. And Crippen gave her all the cover she needed, running interference and taking the heat for banning unwelcome interviews. At the press conference, he cut off debate over Sally’s capabilities with a definitive pronouncement: “Sally’s on this crew because she’s well qualified to be here.” John Fabian, who had been Sally’s classmate for four years and worked with her on the robot arm—some of that time under her supervision—finessed the guy who wondered whether Sally’s presence would require deference from her crewmates. “I don’t think that Dr. Ride needs anybody to defer to her,” he said. “Her capabilities take care of themselves and she’ll stand high in any group. I don’t think it’s an issue at all.”
If NASA managers didn’t high-five each other after the news conference, they should have. In her first major exposure to the media, Sally won, game, set and match. And her crew closed ranks around her without being patronizing. America’s first woman in space could handle herself just fine and the country was falling in love.
Her colleagues’ reaction was more complicated, at least momentarily. Whenever a new crew was named—and there were three that day in April 1982—the people who weren’t on it were jealous. Some took longer to get over it than others.
“There were a bunch of whiners,” recalls Hoot Gibson. “One said, ‘Boy you work like a slave and do you get recognized for it? Hell no!’ ” Gibson took a more genial approach, grabbing his good friend Steve Hawley and dragging him over to George Abbey at the happy hour celebration the evening of the announcement. “And Stevie didn’t know what I was going to say …” (actually, Hawley recalls, “I said to myself, Oh, crap!”) and then Gibson said, “Hey George, Stevie and I wanted to tell you that you really screwed up today.” Pause for effect. “You didn’t pick us!” Gibson laughs at the memory. “Yeah, I was disappointed. You couldn’t help but be disappointed, because they were given their trip to Disneyland. And you weren’t. But doggone it, bury those feelings, don’t let them show, and be happy for them, and that’s what we did.”
Gibson and Hawley, like every one of the thirty-five, would later get their own flights; some, many remarkable times. But on that day when the first of their peers were named, it was touchy. Especially for the other women.
“Not getting the nod was a little bit of a wound,” admits Kathy Sullivan. “I would have loved to go first, for the vote of confidence it represented and endorsements and everything else …”
“I think all of us probably were just a little disappointed that our name wasn’t on the list,” agrees Rhea Seddon, who by then was married to Hoot Gibson and newly pregnant, and thus able to take the broader perspective. “I sort of figured, God has a different plan for me. And I was not all disturbed to take things a little slower.”
Carolyn Huntoon was thrilled for Sally but had five other female astronauts to protect. “Somebody had to be first,” she acknowledged, “and everyone was adult enough to understand that, but everyone was an overachiever, and they were used to being first. There was a dip in this office—I felt it.” Huntoon called Sally and went into full den-mother mode.
“You got it!”
“Yeah.”
“Now, be nice.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
… GET SET …
Training for a shuttle mission took a solid year, and the crew would need every second to prepare. Sally and her crewmates moved into a large office on the third floor of Building 4, where they papered the walls with orbital maps and began molding themselves into a team fully alert to each other’s needs. By the time of the launch, Sally would say, “we felt like a family of five.”
With the usual family hang-ups. Early on, the crew was sent to Building 9, the cavernous home of the orbiter mockup, to go through some drills. They were told to change into flight gear, which meant stripping down to their underwear in the room where their NASA suits were laid out. The entire crew, together. Norm Thagard headed for the men’s room. “I’m from the South and I couldn’t do it,” he says. There were no further assaults on his modesty.
Crippen gave out their assignments. He and Hauck would fly the shuttle. Fabian and Sally would use the robot arm to launch two satellites. Sally would also serve as flight engineer, sitting directly behind Crippen and Hauck during the critical liftoff and landing, following every blink on every monitor, every tick of every gauge, to catch any problems instantly. Anomalies, in NASAspeak. She had to know every contingency procedure, to help run the pilots through precisely ordered checklists if something went wrong. Crippen called her his “third pair of eyeballs.” I ask why he chose Sally for the backup job. “ ‘Cause she’s so darned smart!” he says. “Sally learned the orbiter systems very well and she was very good at working in a nice cool, calm, relaxed manner when there was a semi-crisis going on, so she seemed the perfect one to do that for me.”
It was like a Broadway opening with rehearsals almost every day. They practiced the flight plan over and over in shuttle-sized simulators that replicated everything from the rumbling of the engines to the turbulence of liftoff. Sally stood for hours in the green glow of computer monitors, punching buttons and nudging joysticks to make the robot arm—visible only as a computer animation—obey. Or to perfect the sequence to launch a satellite, which was also conjured up on a screen representing the deep black void of space. It was like Angry Birds without the birds (or the color, or the gorgeous graphics), with blazing red
LED numbers and orange targets brightening the battleship gray of the mockup’s console. Sally showed up in blue jeans, but her concentration was as formal as it was on the tennis court, as it would be in space. During one intense session that coincided with the World Series, she ignored the periodic game updates delivered by a sympathetic engineer. Then again, the Brewers and the Cardinals were not the Dodgers.
“She was just all business,” recalls Susan Okie, who enjoyed exclusive access to Sally’s preflight activities. Sally had invited her old friend, then a respected medical reporter for the Washington Post, to chronicle her training and write her profile before she flew, a handpicked Boswell for her historic journey. Okie’s weeklong series, which Sally hoped would satisfy the requirement for public confessionals, provides an invaluable record of activities the rest of us did not witness. Even today, Okie remembers the serious scientist totally focused on her mission. “She was at her station, and there was a lot of NASA acronym code going back and forth. And she was very geeky, very matter-of-fact and always knowing what to do, not cracking jokes.”
For ascent and entry rehearsals in the motion-based simulator, a full-sized cockpit on stilts that tilted you onto your back the way you’d be on a real liftoff, Sally took her seat behind the commander and pilot, sometimes wearing full flight gear, as they moved through the complex timeline that would get the shuttle off Earth and back again. The sessions could last four hours, or thirty-six for a long-duration “integrated sim,” in which everyone in mission control was also looped in to get them used to working together.
“It was exciting,” explains pilot Rick Hauck. “It was sort of, you pinch yourself and you’re that one step closer to doing this amazing thing. And you wind up practicing emergency procedures so much that if anything like that can become routine, it became routine. That was the objective.”
At which point, one of the technicians—the diabolical Simulation Supervisor, or SimSup (pronounced “SimSoup,” as in chicken noodle)—would drop a virtual sandbag onto their stage, injecting glitch after glitch to test their responses in an emergency. “They were trying to teach us the nuances, to point out maybe a weakness in the procedures or the hardware,” Hauck says. “The objective was to build your confidence so that you could cope with anything.” If you couldn’t, the commander would step in.
“One of the most stressful times for me,” Hauck recalls, “was when Crip and Sally and I were doing an ascent simulation, and on several runs I screwed up and killed us.” That is, the shuttle “crashed” in simulation. “I was as down as ever, I was a mess,” Hauck goes on, “and then Crip said, ‘Well, it was a bad day. Don’t worry about it. Just focus on getting it better the next time.’ ”
Hauck, who would command two shuttle missions of his own with distinction, did it better every time. Crippen’s advice would also inform Sally’s later management style, dovetailing with her own mantra: don’t get hung up on the past; move on, focus forward.
Or just laugh it off. During one ascent simulation, when she was still a rookie ripe for some lighthearted hazing, the team of instructors played a trick. They bought a lifelike rubber rat and tied it to some nylon string, then rolled it up onto the glare shield above the cockpit instruments. Sally climbed into her seat and strapped in for the “launch.” As the lights went out and the machine was elevated, then rotated backwards, the toy rat tumbled off its perch towards Sally’s face. In the dim light of the cockpit instruments, Sally saw it and screamed. “It was a good scream,” recalls former NASA flight trainer Frank Hughes, “so good they tried to record it. She thought it was alive.” Moments later, Sally was laughing with the rest of them. She took the fake rodent into space with her on the shuttle. When she returned, she presented it to the team of instructors, on a plaque with the title, “The Rat Stuff.”
Outside the simulators, they met with technicians at JSC or with off-site contractors to review the tiniest bolt on the flight deck or the button that rehydrated dried food packs. Sally’s life was organized into stacks of cue cards—ring-bound sets of instructions that would fit into her zippered pants-leg pocket—and mountain-sized briefing books. When I dropped in to Houston to report on other flights during her training, I could occasionally persuade her to take time off for a game of racquet-ball or a quick beer. But mostly she studied the contingencies, jogged to stay fit, or strapped into a T-38 to fulfill her flying time. The astronauts lived in their own virtual cockpit, often oblivious to the civilian world. During one T-38 trip out west piloted by Rick Hauck, the plane broke down in Tucson, forcing Sally and Hauck to fly back commercial. As they boarded the jet wearing their flight suits—the only clothing they had brought—and carrying their gear, the captain looked at their parachutes and said, “Is there something about our service you’re worried about?”
Sally was happily obsessed. And still an expert at compartmentalizing. When asked whether she was a workaholic, she answered truthfully, “No, I’m pretty good at going home and lying in front of the television and turning off the rest of the world.”
TIME OUT
Under a warm July sun on a Saturday afternoon in 1982—not a training day—Sally Ride and Steve Hawley got married in the backyard of Steve’s parents’ home in Salina, Kansas. The bride wore white—white jeans, just like the groom. Her shirt was striped, his red. Two family ministers—his father, Bernard, pastor of the local Presbyterian Church, and her sister, Bear—officiated, ending with the Jewish tradition of breaking a glass and shouts of “Mazel Tov!” Bear takes credit for that touch. “There wasn’t too much religious imagery and I thought we needed to do something to celebrate life,” she says. “It was odd.”
Only family attended—both sets of parents, his and her siblings—and the baker was sworn to secrecy when they ordered the cake. Sally “didn’t want to do something large and involved,” Steve recalls. “Keeping it secret was an important part of the plan, which was easier to do if we just got married at my parents’ place.” Steve arrived ahead of time to get the marriage license, facilitated by a lawyer friend of his father’s. Sally flew herself up from Houston in the Grumman Tiger. The wedding photos capture a casual ceremony, with the couple’s arms encircling each other’s waists, after which they cut the clandestine cake. Both grinned broadly as Sally fed the first slice to Steve—an unlikely gulp of tradition for two nonconformists. At the end of the weekend, the newlyweds climbed back into the Tiger to fly themselves home to Houston, both having exchanged their formal jeans for shorts and TFNG tee-shirts. There was no honeymoon. When they left Salina, the Tiger got diverted into Waco because of thunderstorms. “So,” recalls Steve, “we spent our first married night together in a hotel there and continued to Houston on Monday.”
He says the timing was Sally’s, as well as the stealth wedding. “It was all about minimizing the publicity about her. Sally was afraid of people getting too close.” And while they’d never discussed specifics when they moved in together a year earlier, marriage was always on the horizon. Quietly. During dinners in Houston that Sally and I enjoyed several weeks beforehand, she hadn’t uttered a word. Much closer friends were equally unaware until the news broke a few weeks later. “We didn’t want to make a big deal of it,” Sally was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times. A small paper in Ohio wrote that they had “tied the ‘astroknot.’ ” And Steve still chuckles over the clip his father described from his hometown paper, the Salina Journal, which said that the marriage “had been consummated in my parents’ backyard. I presume they meant consecrated.” In The New York Times, the bride was called, inaccurately, “Mrs. Hawley.”
Sally never took Steve’s name, but she was not above borrowing it in an emergency. Back in April, when she’d been summoned back to Houston from Los Angeles for the big announcement, the two of them—who were planning to return separately on different commercial planes—simply exchanged tickets so she could get home first. In those innocent days before photo IDs and body scans (and before they were married), Sally flew home as
S. Hawley. Steve later returned as S. Ride. She didn’t offer to return the favor on the shuttle.
• • •
Bear was surprised that Sally married Steve. “I was surprised that she got married, period. I saw her as an individual.” While I was researching this book, several retired astronauts repeated the rumor that NASA pushed Sally to get married because the agency didn’t want a female astronaut who was, in the picturesque phrase of the 1980s, living out of wedlock. Sally told Susan Okie that “she felt less protective of her personal life now that she and Steve were married. That she didn’t mind talking about the fact that they’d been living together beforehand, which was the main thing that she’d tried to keep a secret.” Why she might have wanted to hide that remains a mystery: NASA hadn’t blinked when she arrived in Houston living with Bill Colson, and no one seems to have cared about her living arrangement with Steve. Her bosses denied to me that they pressured her to get married, and Steve said the rumor was news to him. Nor does Steve think that theirs was a marriage of convenience. “I believe that Sally did love me when we got married,” he says, “and that she entered the marriage in good faith.”
In Steve, Sally again had a soul mate she could trust, a new best buddy with whom she could laugh and swap stories about the simulator. “We really both enjoyed that part of the training,” Steve says. “And one of the things we enjoyed talking about were some of the ‘sim’ cases—you know, ‘Here’s what they did, and that’s really interesting, and here’s what I did, and did you think about this?’ I just thought that was kind of fun.” Sally liked the simulator so much, she once told a reporter, “I still feel like I ought to put a quarter in.” Steve is only slightly embarrassed to add, “Our idea of a good time was to sit down after dinner and go through the ascent checklist! People don’t think that’s very normal.”
