Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Q: Did you ever wish you were a boy?

  A: No, I never thought about that.

  No question was too invasive, but no answer generated the headline being sought. Joyce Ride, who’d confessed that her scariest nightmare was to see “Sally on the cover of the National Enquirer” had nothing to worry about. And if the question wasn’t asked, someone made it up. No one, Sally said, ever asked her, “Will you wear a bra in space?” Still, it persisted in the Sally Ride folklore, complete with a made-up response.

  Adhering to NASA procedure, the May press conference was followed by brief, one-on-one interviews for major media, which gave me a personal take for our ABC News coverage. Sally was more relaxed and a bit more forthcoming. “I don’t mind people asking me,” she told me, “whether I’m going to be doing any of the cooking on orbit, unless it’s asked by someone who expects the only reason I’m flying is because Crip needs somebody to serve him coffee.” Her flight was important, she said, “because it’s something that a woman hasn’t done before. And it’s more evidence that women can do everything.” I asked her—partly in whimsy—“Do you think that you’re as good as any male astronaut here?” Sally didn’t hesitate. “Yeah,” she said instantly, flashing me a look that said she knew I agreed.

  Sally’s father saw a positive effect to the interrogations. “Sally’s answers have been waking a few people up,” Dale Ride said. “I think what she’s doing, as much as anything, is using these questions to help destroy the stereotypes that men respond one way to a situation and women respond in another.” The man who helped raise his daughter without gender limitations had clearly done his job. “It points out the stupidity of believing in the inadequacy of women in handling traditionally male roles,” he said.

  Sally herself later wrote that the attention made her “aware of what our culture would expect of a woman’s reactions and capabilities,” aware of the scrutiny “to see if I would crumble or falter. I felt it was important to react with composure and strength.” She said she understood how Billie Jean King had felt nearly a decade earlier, when the hopes of so many women rested on her victory over Bobby Riggs. “As a woman, as well as a tennis player, I would have been terribly disappointed if Billie Jean had lost that day, but she didn’t. Now I was faced with a similar situation. I didn’t want to let other women down.”

  • • •

  Launch was set for June 18, 1983—two months later than originally planned, which, in Sally’s ever positive outlook, gave her two more months to train. Johnny Carson joked on The Tonight Show that the shuttle would be delayed so that Sally could find a purse to match her shoes. America’s favorite late-night host would work Sally into his monologue half a dozen more times, but the other frat house gags about her deodorant, her pantyhose and—yup—her brassiere, met mostly with boos or embarrassed silence from the studio audience. In just over a year, NASA’s selection and Sally’s conduct had transformed female astronauts from a punch line to a matter of national pride.

  On June 1, the four men and one woman of STS-7 had lunch with President Reagan at the White House, the first shuttle astronauts to do so before flying. It nearly didn’t happen. That morning, Sally and Crippen were at NASA Headquarters for some meetings. As they headed out for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with just half an hour to get there, the NASA elevator got stuck between floors. The commander looked at the upcoming first American woman in space and started laughing, then picked up the elevator phone and said, “You’re not going to believe this …” Someone rescued them and they made it in time to the White House, where Sally sat next to the president.

  The new female face of the shuttle beamed out from the covers of major magazines, from Ms. to Newsweek to People. Time miniaturized her on the tiny fake foldover flap (twice). Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had become the first woman appointed to the High Court two years earlier, and Kathrine Switzer, who had liberated the Boston Marathon for women, were among many who sent telegrams of good luck. Sesame Street’s Miss Piggy wired, “BON VOYAGE,” asking Sally to test the best eye shadow and lip gloss for space travel in anticipation of Piggy’s own turn with the stars. “MOI WANTS TO LOOK LIKE GANGBUSTERS. KISSY KISSY.”

  The telegram from a less vain and more experienced fan, Miss Baker—one of the first female monkeys in space—predicted, “I know you will have the ride of a lifetime,” and extended an invitation to the rocket museum in Huntsville, Alabama, where she lived in retirement, and where “we’ll have a meeting of the great sorority of space.”

  KSC

  Three days before liftoff—L-minus-three in NASA terminology—the crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida in their matching T-38s. I joined a small scrum of reporters who watched the sleek jets taxi down the runway in formation, waiting and filming as the five crew members disembarked and walked across the tarmac to a waiting microphone. Sally, in her royal blue flight suit with the American flag on the left sleeve, toed the line. “Sure thank you all for coming out,” she said blandly. I had never seen her so subdued.

  She was putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to get caught up in the magnitude of the moment. And she grounded herself in nostalgia, calling old friends, watching old movies. She had earlier taken the time to handwrite invitations to her guests, for whom each astronaut had reserved seats in the VIP bleachers, plus access to a bus and car passes. The invites were Sally casual: “Dear Bill,” she wrote Bill Colson on NASA/JSC stationery, “Want to come to a launch? I just happen to have access to some tickets …” Besides her family (now grown to include Bear’s husband and toddler son), her list reviewed her life from Westlake to Stanford, from tennis to volleyball physics, with all past and future romances. Molly, who was now out and openly gay, brought her partner. Tam, still just a friend, was there too. Sally’s sentimental side extended to her shuttle baggage. Among the items she was carrying onboard: banners for Westlake, Stanford, the state of California; gold rings for Steve and herself; a charm for Carolyn Huntoon; a feather for Molly; silver medallions for her family and each of her five female classmates. Sally’s only regret was that she could not share the moment with Elizabeth Mommaerts, her science teacher.

  While Sally settled into the crew quarters, her friends and relatives explored the twenty-mile stretch of scrub and marshland from which every American rocket carrying a human has ever launched. The flat strip of the Kennedy Space Center—on an island by the Atlantic Ocean, and across the Banana River from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station—is both a preserve for glorious nature and a monument to sophisticated technology. Manatees, egrets and alligators share real estate with a spaceport. Towering above all, the mammoth white Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, where the shuttle—like the immense Saturn rockets before it—was mated with its components before its slow parade to the pad. You have no idea how immense the VAB is until you stand beside it, and the numbers barely tell the story: 525 feet tall, 716 feet wide, 518 feet deep. NASA points out that each stripe on the flag painted on the exterior is the size of a tour bus. When you go inside, you feel like an ant. When you look up, you often see clouds inside—and rain. The VAB is big enough to generate its own weather system, a cathedral of technology with a built-in heaven.

  • • •

  To acclimatize her body for space, Sally took some precautions recommended by other astronauts—aerobatics in the T-38, sleeping with her feet elevated. But when she found herself feeling good (“no queasiness, no twinges”) she dropped the preps. She seemed calm and collected. When she called me that Friday before launch, L-minus-one, and swung by the press site for her see-but-don’t-breathe-on-me wave, she was her mischievous self.

  “I remember asking her, ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t be scared to death,’ ” Bear says. “And she said, ‘Because I’m not. I have complete trust in them, and you may not understand that, but you know me.’ We had a conversation about faith. It’s informed trust, and she said, ‘I know enough about this stuff that it’s worth trusting m
y life to.’ ” Molly Tyson had earlier asked her the same question, which Sally dismissed, asking, “What about falling into a time warp? Being swallowed by a black hole? What about an attack by the Klingons?”

  But later that day, Molly heard something very different. George Abbey had noticed that Sally was “pacing,” and summoned Molly to spend some time with her. “You always want the crew to be as relaxed and rested as much as possible before their flight,” Abbey explains, especially “first-time flyers. I thought it would be a good idea for Sally to be with a close friend for a bit.” Because of the medical quarantine, Molly had to pass a quick physical to gain entrance to the “beach house,” on an isolated part of the property. The visit was a surprise to Sally, and the two friends chatted for a time. Molly saw Sally’s excitement, “like an athlete waiting to play on Center Court at Wimbledon.” Then, as Molly departed, Sally stopped her and said, “I’m aware that this is not without risks. I realize I could die.” Molly was stunned. “It struck me as the most vulnerable thing she’d ever said to me,” Molly says now. “I had her on such a high, unreal pedestal that I was surprised by even this hint that she was afraid.” She thinks Sally was reaching out, looking for some connection to their old relationship, but Molly was too shocked to respond. And Sally didn’t follow up. They never spoke of it again.

  Sally’s candor is rare, but not the sensation. After she returned, she would often gloss over her own feelings by quoting Chief Astronaut John Young’s statement about liftoff: “If you show me a person who’s not a little nervous before a launch, I’ll show you a person I wouldn’t want to get in the same room with.”

  • • •

  That night Sally had her final preflight physical exam, rejecting the anti–motion sickness pills but agreeing to the enema (probably just for convenience) and taking a sleeping pill to guarantee a solid eight hours before launch. She went to bed at 7:00 p.m.

  As she dropped into a deep sleep, Challenger stood at attention on Pad 39A, the same one from which Neil Armstrong was shot to the Moon. Banks of xenon lights bathed the stack in a brilliant glow against the pitch black sky. Overnight, half a million gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen filled the giant external tank.

  Seated in the darkened cockpit—keeping watch—was astronaut Anna Fisher, one month away from delivering her first baby. For this flight, she was the lead of the “Cape Crusaders,” the team of astronauts who served as the link between the crew and their activities at the Cape. Once the switches in the cockpit were set, a Cape Crusader maintained guard duty to be sure no one accidentally (or otherwise) changed the configuration. “It was fun, and great training,” Fisher tells me of her night, lying on her back, all alone, in the darkened vehicle—a pregnant woman in the cockpit, securing the site for the crew with the first American woman about to launch. A scene for the history books.

  On the other hand, that same afternoon, Fisher had been at the crew quarters, her belly bump unconcealed by the blue flight suit that all astronauts wore during the countdown. The NASA administrator, passing her in the hallway, took a quick look and said, “Safe flight, Sally.”

  GO!

  In the orange glow of the Florida dawn, Sally lay on her back, strapped into the hard metal seat in Challenger’s cockpit, breathing oxygen through the hose connected to her helmet. Four checklists lay open, with tabs to contingency plans, just in case. Straight ahead were screens that would display the pulse points of their path to space, vital information she would monitor for just over eight crucial minutes until they were safely in orbit. When she stretched upward to her left, she could see the launch tower through the window beyond commander Bob Crippen; to the right, outside pilot Rick Hauck’s window, the cloudless sky was turning blue. With minutes to go she took her own pulse. 56. Very mellow.

  Since awakening that morning at 3:13 a.m.—just over four hours before launch—Sally had been struggling to keep control of her emotions, to concentrate on her job. She had washed and dried her hair, then proceeded to the traditional crew breakfast, where she ate cereal, three pieces of toast and orange juice (“more than usual”) “trying to look like nothing unusual was about to happen,” as TV cameras recorded her every move.

  More cameras greeted the “walkout,” flashbulbs popping in those pre–cell phone days, as the crew headed into their Astrovan for the quick drive to the launch complex. Approaching the pad, Sally thought the colossal machine sounded like an animal, gurgling and hissing as if it were alive. Riding up the 195-foot-long elevator to reach the shuttle’s entry hatch, she tried not to look down. Before she entered the White Room, where her helmet and hose would be fitted, she used the restroom—“last toilet on Earth,” according to one NASA manager.

  Now it was time.

  “T minus 35 seconds, we’re just a few seconds away from switching command to the onboard computers,” announced Hugh Harris, the voice of Launch Control.

  With less than a minute to go, launch managers handed off to Challenger, putting the spacecraft’s computers in charge. Instantly, Sally realized, “I felt totally helpless. Totally overwhelmed by what was happening. It was just very, very clear that for the next several seconds we had absolutely no control over our fates. I had a sense of being overwhelmed—maybe the first time in my entire life that I truly felt that way.”

  The countdown sequence is meticulously calibrated, a precise order of events that every astronaut can repeat by rote. But once the computers take over, the seconds tick by too quickly to follow. Sally just had to feel it.

  “T minus 5, 4, 3 …”

  Challenger’s massive main engines roared to life, producing billows of white steam that enveloped the launch pad and a gentle rumble that rippled through Sally’s body. The dark visor on her helmet was down. She held onto her pencil. Three seconds later, the solid rockets ignited, twin crackling sticks of power breaking the force of gravity and heaving the 4.5-million-pound stack upwards. At 7:33 a.m. on June 18, 1983, her world changed.

  “And liftoff, liftoff of STS-7 and America’s first woman astronaut. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.”

  “All of a sudden,” Sally said, “we were going someplace.”

  Challenger rotated counterclockwise as it streaked through the skies, a ballerina pirouetting to stardom.

  “Roll program,” radioed Crippen from the flight deck, his voice straining above the thunder.

  Sally, too, fought the turbulence to follow her script and call out, “LVLH,” a reminder to Crip and Hauck that the cockpit switches should now reflect the Local Vertical Local Horizontal position of the spaceship. When she pronounced the next milestone—“forty seconds”—they were nearly three miles high and supersonic. The ride was noisy and rough, shaking their seats and rattling their heads in their helmets, but, Sally observed, “We all seemed to be clipping along pretty well, and really very confident, a little bit buoyant.” Two minutes in, they left Earth’s atmosphere, and the rockets split away with a whitish-orange flash, the brightness startling Sally. Now the ride smoothed out, solid and steady on the mighty engines. And quiet enough so she could lift her visor. She checked the instruments and displays to confirm that all was in order, so invigorated that she barely noticed the buildup of 3G forces pushing her body into her seat as she bent her head to turn the pages of her checklist.

  “Roger, MECO [Main Engine Cut Off],” confirmed ground control.

  Right on schedule, the main engines shut down and Challenger hung free, nearly 68 miles high. It had taken eight and a half minutes.

  Sally did the standard astronaut trick of setting her checklist in front of her and watching it float. “I wanted to try out all the different things I could do,” she said. Next to her, John Fabian emitted whoops of joy. A little over two minutes later, Crippen fired Challenger’s smaller engines to boost them into their proper orbit; a second firing would come half an hour later. From some 184 miles high, traveling 17,500 miles an hour, Sally reminded the world of her California childhood.

 
“Houston, Challenger. Have you ever been to Disneyland?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “That was definitely an E ticket.”

  “Roger that, Sally.”

  • • •

  It was only years later, when she’d had time to assess her experience through the lens of time and disaster, that she could describe “the psychological and emotional feeling that come along with the actual launch … fueled by the realization that you’re … sitting on top of tons of rocket fuel and it’s basically exploding underneath you. It’s an emotionally and psychologically overwhelming experience. Very exhilarating. Exhilarating, terrifying, and overwhelming all at the same time.”

  Her parents felt it without leaving the ground.

  As Dale Ride watched his firstborn climb into space atop a white-hot column of power, he dropped his jaw in pure amazement. Or just relief. Tears ran down his grinning face. His wife, Joyce, looked stunned, and held the waiting press at bay with a broad smile, a cup of water in her cocked arm, and a mock threat: “The first one who asks how I feel gets it.” Then she upheld the family’s reputation for quick wit when asked her advice to future space travelers. “Think about your mother!” she urged. Finally, she added this benediction to a day that had turned out, well, heavenly: “How about, God bless Gloria Steinem!”

  The prominent feminist, who had watched the launch a few feet away from the Rides, predicted, “Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.” Antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, who had also been invited by NASA, thought it was fine that Sally, not she, had flown: “I have no desire to be an astronaut,” she said. “My eighteen-year-old daughter doesn’t want to be an astronaut either.” No mention of sanitary facilities.

  My seventy-nine-year-old mother also didn’t want to be an astronaut but was thrilled that I’d brought her to Florida to experience the moment. “I’ve seen the horse and buggy,” Shirley Sherr told me afterwards. “I’ve seen the car and the train and the airplane. And now this.” That a woman was aboard was, she said, “Perfect.”