Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  The Hawley-Ride homestead—a beige-brick contemporary on a quiet, leafy street with a small pool in back and a large fish tank inside—is probably best described as late-century Space Modern. A framed print of the artwork that became the TFNG tee-shirt decorated one wall; photos of the shuttle and T-38s, another. An image of the Moon landing hung in their bedroom. Later, pictures from STS-7 would be added, along with the original drawings for some of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips, poking fun at the misadventures of Utah Senator Jake Garn as an astronaut when he finagled his own shuttle ride.

  With its shuttle décor and their new Apple III computer—on which they played endless hours of the fantasy game Zork—the house also reflected the updated status of NASA marriages. Like Sally’s classmates Rhea Seddon and Hoot Gibson, who had married several months earlier, and Anna Fisher, whose husband Bill Fisher was in the 1980 class, the new generation of marriages brought two equal fliers under one roof, a far cry from the way wives were pigeonholed and kept from the Cape back in the early days. Getting to space so consumed their lives, Steve joked that Sally’s response to, “When’s dinner going to be ready?” was usually, “Half an hour. What are we having?”

  Theirs was, Steve acknowledges, “a bit of an odd relationship. I don’t know that anybody would have said we behaved much like a traditional husband and wife, but of course she wasn’t a traditional wife personality. I kind of recognized that it went with the territory.”

  I ask Steve what he means by “traditional.”

  “If I was going to Florida for the week, coming back on Friday night, I’d call her up and she’d say, ‘I’m going to California for the weekend, see you next week!’ Not like, ‘Oh, you’ve been gone all week, looking forward to having you home.’ She pretty much did her own thing.”

  Still, at least at first, they seemed to understand each other, secure in their own verbal shorthand, finishing each other’s sentences and communicating with nods and gestures. “By the time we were married and had been living with each other,” Sally said, “we got so that we didn’t have to talk.” Adds Steve, “I knew what she wanted and she knew what I wanted. We didn’t talk about where we wanted to be ten years from now.”

  Nor did they discuss that other topic central to many young marrieds.

  One of Sally’s early jobs had been babysitting. At lunchtime one day, she made the kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But the kids wouldn’t eat them because they said the peanut butter was on the wrong side of the bread. Sally tossed the sandwiches, started over and never babysat again. At seventeen, she told her parents that she didn’t want children. Her parents joked that when Sally’s nephew, Whit (Bear’s son), was christened, Sally was more nervous holding the baby after “the ceremony than she probably will be for the shuttle launch.”

  Several years later, in the only interview Sally and Steve did together—with NBC’s Jane Pauley, who had become a friend of Steve’s during the shuttle coverage—the Today show cohost tried valiantly to drill down. “Maybe I have no business asking,” she said, but “do you think about children?” Sally laughed, more of a nervous pause, and said, abruptly, “Think about it sometimes, but you’re right, you have no business asking. We’ve elected not to answer personal things.” Pauley acknowledged defeat and jumped to her next, less intrusive, question.

  The wall around their innermost views was, Steve reminds me, jointly constructed. But hers was unquestionably higher. “Talking is contrary to her personality,” Steve would tell a reporter some years later. “She’s more from Mars than from Venus.” Later, Steve would gain many insights into the woman he’d married. Later, he’d question much of their relationship and wonder about her behavior. But when he married her on July 24, 1982, he understood and happily accepted that with her flight on STS-7 less than a year away, the only thing that mattered was her mission. “She was very focused on what she needed to do in her role and I wasn’t a priority,” he says. “I understood that and accepted it.” Steve also understood the bigger picture. “To actually be prime crew and to get to attempt launch was the goal that we all joined NASA for. She didn’t really care that much about being first. She cared about being good. And she really worked hard at being good. If she’d been a bozo, that would probably have set women astronauts back decades. None of the six were bozos. But she was just clearly very qualified and very competent. She was the best choice.”

  As Sally’s biggest booster, Steve handled the inevitable comments with aplomb, shaking off every reference to himself as “the husband of …” When Salina, Kansas, decided to erect a historical marker for its famous astronaut son, Steve joked that that the sign would read, “Hometown-in-law of Sally Ride.” No one in the family was immune. In 1986, when Steve’s father was invited by fellow Kansan senator Bob Dole to deliver the invocation for the US Senate (on the first day TV cameras were allowed in the chamber), the guest chaplain was introduced by Republican Strom Thurmond as Sally Ride’s father. Reverend Hawley politely ignored the error.

  Just before Sally flew, Steve got named to his own crew. “His flight assignment,” Sally said, “did wonders for our marriage.”

  ANATOMY LESSONS

  Q: Dr. Ride, apart from the obvious differences, how do you assess the differences in men and women astronauts?

  A: Aside from the obvious differences, I don’t think there are any.

  —Prime crew press conference, April 29, 1982

  The doublex chromosome did not affect the way astronauts flipped switches, and NASA made no major changes in its flying equipment to accommodate the eight women now in the astronaut corps (six pioneers, two 1980 additions: Mary Cleave and Bonnie Dunbar). But there were some minor (and critical) adjustments in facilities and outlook. The gym included a women’s locker room, with the hair dryers and bigger towels that Carolyn Huntoon had mandated, plus posters of Tom Selleck (courtesy of Judy Resnik). The shuttle’s onboard toilet (or Waste Collection System, WCS), a sturdy improvement over the urine-catching condoms (“roll-on cuffs,” in prim NASAspeak) and plastic bags (for solid waste) of the Apollo era, had a curtain to give users of either gender some privacy. In addition, the funnel-like device attached to the flexible hose, to suction waste away from the body, came in several wider versions for the women. Rhea Seddon remembers flying in the KC-135, with its thirty-second arcs of weightlessness, to test the urine collection devices. The pressure was, literally, on them. “We would try to go up with a full bladder,” she says. But the brief opportunities meant “it wasn’t entirely satisfactory.”

  Sally would be the first female to use the WCS in space. She would also be the first to test the DACT—Disposable Absorption Collection Trunk—a form-fitting and highly absorbent diaper with a super-absorbent silica gel (just like that in babies’ diapers) that they wore under their flight suits for launch and landing, when there’s no chance to head for the head. And with the seats for the commander and pilot now adjustable, to accommodate the wider range of human sizes flying the shuttle, the shorter legs and arms of future female fliers would fit in fine.

  On the social front, George Abbey’s office wall sported a hot pink bumper sticker reading “A Woman’s Place Is in the Cockpit” and Bob Crippen, the very model of a fighter pilot, learned from Sally Ride never to use the term “manned space flight.” In time, Rhea Seddon would prove that flying in T-38s was safe for pregnant women in their first trimester; Anna Fisher would become the first mother to fly in space; and flight surgeons with gynecological experience would replace the unenlightened fellow who tried to get a Pap smear from a female astronaut with an upside down sample stick.

  Even the graphics had grown up. The official STS-7 shuttle patch included the biological symbol for Woman.

  • • •

  Ground controllers took their own time. For many months after Sally was named to her flight, every female voice radioed from a T-38 would be met by the hopeful question, “Sally, is that you?” The other women aloft learned to say, “Yes.”

 
Sally also understood that some decisions about her upcoming flight were better made as a group. “Sally was now the prime female,” Rhea Seddon says. “But she was very inclusive about, ‘Let’s all get together and answer this question.’ And we had to answer some dumb engineering questions. Like, ‘What if all the mucous that women put out will stop up the toilet?’ And we’re all sitting there looking at this highly placed engineer who’d been there forever, and we’re saying, ‘What mucous?’ And then he blushes.” Seddon, an accomplished surgeon, breaks into laughter. “They’re engineers! What do they know about women’s physiology?!”

  Kathy Sullivan got involved during the “bench check” for STS-7, when they reviewed Sally’s personal gear. Everything that flew had to be vetted, for, among other things, off-gassing. This was the first time it was considered through a gender lens, and Sally was the guinea pig. “She patrolled the hallways to grab one of us and be sure there was a second view,” Sullivan says. “I … was around, so I went over with her.” The issue was Sally’s Female Preference Kit (FPK), the traveling toiletries case that every astronaut took into space. The women had already lobbied to replace the British Sterling deodorant, the men’s hair tonic and the Old Spice shaving cream with more female-friendly lotions and potions. They had also included an item that only NASA could obscure as Female Hair Restraints. We call them rubber bands. A brief flap over how much make-up to include led to a pick-your-own decision. Sally didn’t take any.

  But the new female FPK had something else.

  “Sally opens it up and looks in, and looks up at me with this rolling of the eyes that I had come to know as her ‘you have got to be kidding me’ look,” Kathy Sullivan says. “She reaches in and picks up this edge of this band of pink plastic, and now I can see tampon, tampon, tampon, tampon. Then she reaches the bottom of the string and pulls again, and it was like a bad stage act. There just seemed to be this endless unfurling of Lord only knows how many tampons.” They were all strung together like sausages, so they wouldn’t float off in the weightlessness of space. A scissors was included in the kit to cut the little tubes apart. “We’re both starting to laugh, and mathematics is flashing through my mind. There are some things we know about this. This is a simple physiological process.”

  Menstruation has long befuddled the brains of those unable to experience it. It has also been blamed for all manner of infirmity. Dr. Randy Lovelace’s team concluded that the women who performed so well with the grueling 1959 Mercury astronaut tests were complicated by “monthly physiologic changes … [that made them] inattentive and accident-prone.” Just over a decade later, a Democratic party activist named Ed Berman (who happened to be a physician) told a female congresswoman (Patsy Mink of Hawaii) that the reason women shouldn’t aspire to high office in this country was because of women’s once-a-month “raging hormonal influences.” Rhea Seddon understood the folklore that threatened the women of her generation: “I’m sure they’ll be watching to see if women go bananas because it’s just about time for their period to begin,” she said as a trainee. “It’s foolish, but we have to prove it’s foolish. They didn’t think that Alan Shepard would be able to swallow or urinate in weightlessness, and he proved that was ridiculous. And I think women will have to prove certain things about their abilities that might seem equally ridiculous.”

  Until then, the Johnson Space Center was there to help. “I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight,” Sally Ride said. “They asked, ‘Is one hundred the right number?’ ”

  “No,” Sally said. “That would not be the right number.”

  “Well, we want to be safe.”

  “Well, you can cut that in half with no problem at all,” Sally told them. She was laughing when she recounted the story. So was Kathy Sullivan.

  “I think I just fell on the floor … That was pretty funny. ‘Not quite so many, guys. It’s just a bit overkill.’ ”

  Sally wouldn’t need any of it. Jogging twenty-five miles a week stopped her periods. The engineers didn’t need to know that.

  (Much later, the first American woman to actually use tampons in space—a distinction she prefers to keep unpublished—discovered that the capillary action meant she needed a pad as well. NASA wound up letting the women pack their own supplies.)

  It was, at least, gender light-years from Sally’s first encounter with NASA swag. Back in 1978, when she was invited to Edwards Air Force Base to see another test landing of Enterprise, every visiting astronaut—including the women—received souvenirs of the occasion: gold-plated shuttle tie-clips and cuff-links.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, another woman went into space. Svetlana Savitskaya, an experienced, thirty-four-year-old Soviet test pilot, launched aboard a Soyuz 7 on August 19, 1982, on a mission with two male cosmonauts that lasted nearly eight days and included a rendezvous with the space station. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported that “no substantial differences in the reactions of the female and male organisms to the influence of space flight factors were found.” American officials huffed that the timing of the trip of the second female in space looked suspiciously like propaganda to undercut Sally’s upcoming flight. But being number three didn’t bother Sally at all.

  THE PRESS, THE PRESSURE

  The closer it got to liftoff, the more tightly Sally stayed sealed in the protective NASA bubble. When the barrier was breached—when a reporter or tourist trespassed her privacy zone—she could, in her terms, “flip the switch marked ‘Oblivious.’ ” Or, as she said to the guy who asked, again, her reaction to all the buzz about her, “I am so excited to get a chance to fly that I’m able to ignore all you people.” She couldn’t avoid every interview—and fully understood her new role as a NASA spokesperson—but with twenty or so daily requests in the weeks just before her flight (a “paralyzing” volume comparable to that of the Neil Armstrong days, according to NASA), she had to draw the line somewhere. Ironically, one of the publications that never got an audience was Life magazine, onetime benefactor and lionizer of the first generation of astronauts. I have no idea if Sally contributed to that decision, but correspondence between Life’s top editor and NASA’s top managers makes it clear that the space agency would have liked her to comply. She did not.

  On May 24, 1983, NASA held the traditional preflight crew press conference, the last chance for the media at large to understand the mission and to get some good quotes. Sally had grown ever more confident in the year since she and her crew had first met the press, and the gold chains around her neck were now joined by the slim wedding band on her left hand. She nonchalantly drummed her fingers on the desk—a lifelong trait that must have dug trenches onto public lecterns, corporate tables and the frame of innumerable T-38s awaiting takeoff—as she batted back questions from a press corps starved for news. The quality of the inquisition thirty years ago uncovered no Pulitzer contenders; Sally’s answers, however, were keepers:

  Q: When you’re not on duty, what are you looking forward to doing?

  A: When I’m not on duty? [Turning to Commander Crippen.] Are you letting me off duty, Crip? [Laughter.]

  Q: Has it taken a little bit of getting used to working with four men … and do they tend to defer to you?

  A: It really hasn’t taken any getting used to. I was a graduate student in physics and I was used to working with men… . I haven’t felt like I’ve been deferred to in any way. In fact, Crip won’t even open doors for me anymore.

  Q: Do you have any plans to be the first mother who has traveled to space?

  A: You’ll notice that I’m not answering the … question. [Here, a chortle.]

  There were some queries that Sally treated seriously. Did she think the coverage of her was disproportionate? “I think maybe it’s too bad that our society isn’t further along and this is such a big deal,” she said. “But if the American public thinks it’s a big deal, then it’s probably good that it’s g
etting the coverage that it’s getting. I think it’s time … that people realize that women in this country can do any job they want to do.”

  As for her promotion to a symbol for womankind, “I’ve come to realize that I will be a role model,” she said at the preflight press conference. “That’s something that I didn’t come to NASA intending to be. I joined the program to get a chance to fly… . What I intend to do is do as good a job as I can, do what I was trained to do while I’m up there, and hope that that provides a good role model.”

  Sally stopped talking when she was done with her responses—didn’t stumble on, looking to clarify or qualify. That is very hard to do. But the would-be Dodgers shortstop fielded every ball with finesse. Even the one that I’d nominate as the dumbest question to anyone of all time. The reporter was from Time magazine. And he started by saying he had “a couple of quick questions here, sir, or ma’am.” Sally shook the confusion off, laughing. He remained clueless, warming up slowly. “What are you going to do after the end of this flight … do you sense you’ll become a footnote in history or will you go on the shelf?” The NASA public relations man muttered, sotto voce, “Cancel your subscription to Time?” Sally took the high road, answering that she’d “get back in line for another flight.” The reporter, foolishly, went on. He was wondering, he said, about her training. When there was a glitch, or a problem, “How did you respond? How do you take it as a human being? Do you weep?” Now Sally closed her eyes, smiling and shaking her head as if to say, “Is he for real?” Then she laughed out loud, gestured to pilot Rick Hauck sitting to her right and said, “Why doesn’t anybody ask Rick these questions!” The crew, as usual, closed the circle, with Crippen interjecting, “The commander weeps!”

  Aviation Week & Space Technology, the industry’s poker-faced technical bible, editorialized about the “patronizing drivel” being thrown at Sally during the entire run-up to her flight. They hadn’t even heard this one, lobbed after the press conference: