Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  But the contrasts that brought them together also threatened their new relationship.

  “Sally was worried that I was too into talking about all the emotional stuff, that I was too fiery,” Tam recalls. “And I was worried about all the opposite things: that she couldn’t give enough and that she couldn’t get emotional. Will she be able to tell me everything about herself and how she feels? So we had a few months of just trying to figure out how serious it was. It took us a little while to decide that it was a relationship we both wanted to keep.” Tam elaborates: “I’m very private too, but Sally is really hard to know in the deeper recesses. I wanted someone I could get to know in a way that I could talk about everything. I wasn’t sure Sally was capable of that.” Still, Tam says, “We were both just madly in love with each other—we hardly ate. When we saw each other, we just wanted to be together. Really, we both lost a lot of weight.”

  They were both pretty trim to begin with.

  Over the next few months, Sally traveled to Atlanta regularly. “It was just impossible for us not to be together,” Tam says. Kay Loveland saw a playful, passionate pair. “You could just tell there was this bloom of love,” she tells me. “They would hold hands, or touch shoulders. They were so comfortable just being together. They didn’t need a whole lot of other people around them.” Loveland says that during a period of real estate transition, when she and her husband, Joe, invited Tam to stay with them for a few weeks, Sally moved in, too, perfectly relaxed about sharing Tam’s bedroom in their home. “They were both quite open around me and my husband,” Loveland says, “and neither Sally nor Tam ever asked me to keep their relationship a secret.”

  But their involvement was not more widely known, certainly not by Sally’s husband.

  “She was famous, she was married,” Tam says. “I knew that NASA was very conservative, and Sally was still an astronaut. And on some level I just don’t think we thought about it. We loved being together, and we were very discreet. She certainly didn’t want to hurt Steve.”

  Steve Hawley was deep into training for his next mission. He knew that Sally and Tam were close friends, and while it did seem that Sally was absent more than usual, he never put the two together. That she was unfaithful to their marriage never crossed his mind; there were lots of things they never talked about. And plenty more that kept Sally busy, apart from her compelling new romance.

  VICTORY LAPS

  She served two more missions as CapCom, including one in November 1985, during which she had to relay the news of a power disruption at the ground tracking station in Dakar, Senegal. An alien had invaded the computer works, leading to a momentary outbreak of giggles in Mission Control. “The cause of the fluctuation was found to be an eighteen-inch monitor-type lizard,” Sally told the astronauts orbiting Earth, reading from the printout. “The lizard was dislodged with a screwdriver and scampered away.” As the crew aloft and her colleagues in Mission Control guffawed, Sally barely made it through the message, laughing as she concluded, “The lizard was last seen moving at a rapid pace across the plains of Senegal.”

  In October, she became one of the first two members of the Women’s Hall of Fame established by the National Women’s Forum in Washington, DC. The other inductee was Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, also a Stanford alumna. Later that month, Sally visited the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, birthplace of the American women’s movement, where she returned a white silk scarf worn by pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart that she had carried into space on her second mission. Earhart had disappeared during her round-the-world flight in 1937, a loss noted by Gloria Steinem in a handwritten thank-you to Sally for appearing on her interview show. “Before you, we had Amelia Earhart—but it’s great to have one who came back.” In 1988, Sally would be inducted into that Hall as well.

  She threw out the first ball at a World Series game in Kansas City; then, from their seats behind the dugout along the first base line, she and Steve cheered the victory of his hometown Royals. In November, Sally became the seventeenth person to receive the Order of Magellan at the Circumnavigators Club. Others included General Douglas MacArthur, Neil Armstrong and Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, whose raft Sally had seen in Oslo. In December, the 1985 Associated Press survey of 1,700 editors and reporters from newspapers across the country listed Sally second among the twenty-five most influential women who “have the strongest effect on both public policy and public opinion.” Heading the list was Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

  A year and a half after her first flight, Sally remained an American hero, with no public hints of the personal fissures below the surface. Steve Hawley, however, was beginning to feel the cracks. On January 12, 1986, he flew into space aboard Columbia on STS-61C, his second flight. Sally, he says, “did execute her responsibilities as a crew spouse”—which meant being there—“but she pretty much made it clear that she wasn’t enjoying it.” Her postflight publicity demands, he tells me, had been stressful both on her and on their marriage. “I tried to understand what she was going through and be supportive, but I still wasn’t a priority for her.” Steve recognized at the time that among the many things they had in common were “our personalities, which inhibited having long conversations about our relationship.” Today, having reconsidered, he reminds me that he did not know Tam was more than a friend. “I guess if I was clueless about that, I could have been clueless about other things.”

  • • •

  But the Hawley-Ride marital troubles, and Sally’s love affair with Tam, would shortly be overshadowed.

  At the beginning of 1986, with twenty-four successful shuttle missions, NASA eagerly toted up its accomplishments. In five years, all thirty-five members of Sally’s class had flown; they had walked in space, launched and landed both at night and in Florida, placed twenty-one commercial satellites successfully in orbit, and performed a number of scientific experiments. NASA was promoting its four orbiters (Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis) as a fancy fleet of trucks ready to deliver the world’s satellites. The Kennedy Space Center, they boasted, was starting to look like a space port. Management had declared the program “operational,” saying the shuttle finally offered regular access to space. Fifteen launches were scheduled for the rest of the year—nowhere near the twice-a-month schedule NASA had promised, but still pretty ambitious for an agency that had barely flown nine the year before. The word they were using for the performance of the most complex space machine ever built was routine. Unfortunately, “routine” wasn’t news, and the broadcast networks were losing interest. Whether that reflected or drove public apathy, the result was the same: NASA needed support from all fronts to maintain its funding and, thus, its momentum.

  That’s partly why NASA finally agreed to send a reporter on the shuttle, a gesture that certainly got my attention. After four years of transcribing most astronauts’ descriptions of what it was like up there—“neat” being their version of an expressive adjective—I had been among those lobbying NASA to let a professional explainer fly, to let one of us explain what space travel was actually like. When the Journalist-In-Space competition was announced, Sally volunteered to write me a recommendation. She believed then that civilians from other professions could gain “a different perspective on the experience,” and might help broaden public interest in the program. I also think she saw my recommendation as the kind of favor you do for a next-door neighbor’s kid. Fully aware that I would read what she wrote—and no doubt convinced that she could arrange never to fly with a greenhorn like me (me, the Greek major who had avoided physics because botany seemed a more useful college science)—she typed out an essay that made me sound like Brenda Starr with wings:

  As someone who has talked to Lynn across a microphone several times, I consider myself well-qualified to evaluate at least some of her journalistic talents. Each time she interviewed me, or reported a story I was familiar with, she did so with professionalism and integrity; her stories r
eflect an understanding of the (often technical) subject matter and a sensitivity for the (often reluctant) subject.

  … Lynn has a talent for translating complex technical concepts into images that a nontechnical audience can understand… . I experienced the thrill of a launch, the magnificence of orbital flight, and the rush of reentry, but I have been frustrated to find that I don’t have the talent to communicate those experiences. I think Lynn does. She is the journalist I would choose to report on the emotions, sensations and thoughts that are part of an adventure that I have experienced, but can’t describe.

  On the line marked “relationship to applicant,” Sally wrote, “Interviewee/Friend.” She signed it on January 7, 1986. I thanked her profusely and started packing.

  Journalists, however, would have to wait their turn. Along with downplaying the risk of space travel, NASA was promoting the shuttle as a platform for education. The first civilian chosen to fly would be a schoolteacher.

  CHALLENGER

  “I don’t think any teacher has been more ready to have two lessons,” Christa McAuliffe told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center. “I just hope everybody tunes in.” At age thirty-five, McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, had won NASA’s first civilian-in-space competition, a public relations gambit to involve school kids in the shuttle and energize the program. She was assigned to the mission called STS-51L, on Challenger, with commander Richard Scobee, a rugged-looking Air Force test pilot who had flown combat missions in Vietnam; pilot Mike Smith, a Navy test pilot and Vietnam veteran as well; mission specialist Ron McNair, a saxophone-playing physicist (with a PhD from MIT) who’d been the second African American to fly; mission specialist Ellison Onizuka, an engineer from the Air Force Test Pilot School; and payload specialist Greg Jarvis, an engineer with Hughes Aircraft. The flight engineer was mission specialist Judy Resnik.

  By late January, the flight had been either scrubbed or rescheduled four times. On Tuesday, January 28, 1986, it was cleared for liftoff. Icicles fringed the tower, and onlookers could see their breath in the unusually frigid Florida temperatures, as NASA started the final countdown to an 11:38 a.m. launch. Around the country, millions of students, teachers and principals were tuned in to see one of their own fly into space.

  I wasn’t there. Like most members of the regular space media, I’d been sent to California, to cover the robotic mission of the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its close encounter with the planet Uranus, nearly two billion miles away. The first-ever images of the mysterious, gaseous planet were magnificent: yard-wide ice boulders forming Uranus’s nine rings; ten new moons orbiting the cold, dark planet, tiny stones in the mosaic of the universe that scientists would study for clues to our own existence. That, rather than the schoolteacher, was deemed the significant space story of the week.

  So I wasn’t among those shivering at the Cape and staring into the clear blue sky when, seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the pillar of fire pushing Challenger skyward split grotesquely into plumes of smoke going nowhere, as chunks of the shuttle careened crazily off course. The rockets veered one way, the tank another; the crew compartment shot up, then down, to rest, finally, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Seven lives lost, the vehicle destroyed, the space program crushed. The Challenger explosion was the worst space disaster in the world.

  Sally Ride didn’t see it, either. She’d been in Atlanta for a long weekend, celebrating Tam’s thirty-fourth birthday. When the shuttle blew up, Sally was on a commercial airliner, headed back to Houston. The pilot, unaware of his famous passenger, announced the awful news through the PA system. “My heart sank,” Sally later recalled. “I didn’t know what to think. I wanted information and I wanted it now.” She pulled out her NASA badge and made her way to the cockpit. “They let me put on an extra pair of headsets to monitor the radio traffic to find out what had happened. We were only about a half hour outside of Houston; when we landed, I headed straight back to JSC.”

  The loss shrouded the Astronaut Office. Four of their classmates from the Thirty-five New Guys were dead: Dick Scobee, El Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair. Scobee and Resnik had been Sally’s seatmates at the 1978 press conference when they were introduced to the public. “These were people that I had known for eight years,” she said. “I’d worked with them every day, I’d gone to dinner at their houses, I knew their families. So they were very, very close, close friends.” And, she said, they “were killed in a way that we could experience and could understand. Steve had been on the flight before the accident. It could have been him. I was scheduled to go up a couple flights after the accident. It could have been me.” Sally couldn’t get her mind off the place she’d sat during her liftoffs, right behind the commander and pilot. Right where Judy Resnik sat as well. “When I visualized what’s going on in the cockpit during that accident, Judy’s seat is where I picture what must have happened and what they must have been going through.”

  Challenger, which had twice carried her to space and back, was now shredded; the robot arm, which she’d used so successfully and helped form into the iconic 7 in happier times, had been ripped from its moorings and drowned in the sea. All shuttle flights were suspended indefinitely.

  Like everyone else in the tightly tethered community that lived and worked together, Sally put her grief on hold as she helped with logistics for the families and the funerals. When I saw her two days later, her face was still ashen. I’d covered the story from California, then flown to Houston for the nationally televised memorial at which President Reagan would speak. My husband, Larry, who’d also been in California, joined me the night before the event. We had dinner with Sally, Steve, and Steve’s father, Reverend Bernard Hawley, who’d been invited by George Abbey to deliver the opening prayer. I asked what his message would be. “We have to give people permission to cry,” Reverend Hawley told me. It was, I thought, a tough task when your audience includes a corps of stiff-upper-lip astronauts. But he did and they did. The entire nation wept.

  The next day, Larry and I were at Sally and Steve’s house when the phone rang. The NASA administrator was calling, asking Sally to be on the presidential commission to investigate the accident. It would become known by the name of its chairman, former Secretary of State William P. Rogers. Among the other distinguished members from industry and aerospace: rocket scientist Albert “Bud” Wheelon, who helped develop the CIA’s network of spy satellites; moonwalker Neil Armstrong; Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. Sally was the only shuttle astronaut, in fact, the only current NASA employee named to the blue-ribbon panel, a vital link to the space agency with an intimate grasp of how things worked, and a space traveler’s compulsion to pin down the problem that could have killed her, too. It was a dismal but critical job, another one of those moments to seize. “I need to do this,” she said quietly, as she hung up the phone.

  Much later she elaborated: “It was very difficult, but on the other hand, every one of the astronauts wanted to be doing something, contributing in some way to getting NASA back on its feet, and investigating what went wrong.” The destruction of Challenger, she said, “wasn’t something that I could walk away from, no matter how painful it was. If nothing else, I needed closure. I needed to know what the answer was and that NASA was going to do something to fix it.”

  THE ROGERS COMMISSION

  A grieving nation had grown increasingly angry, demanding answers. The twelve men and one woman charged with finding them had 120 days to submit their report. They would interview more than 160 individuals in more than 35 formal sessions—some closed, many open to the public and the press. The latter was mandated by the chairman, who understood the role of the media surrounding an issue that had long been part of the national spirit. Americans believed that flying in space helped define them; the obliteration of Challenger, its crew and the future of exploration threatened the national spirit.

  In a short time, the physical cause of the explosion became clear: the seal made by two O-
rings (twelve-foot-diameter rubber gaskets shaped like an O) on the right-hand solid rocket booster—made up of circular sections stacked and clamped together—had failed, allowing hot gas to escape. The gap was no thicker than a human hair, but that was enough. Within a minute after liftoff, the superhot temperatures and immense pressure fed a vicious flame that licked out through the joint and dissolved the strut connecting the rocket to the orbiter. As the suddenly freed booster pivoted free, it smashed into the wing of the orbiter, then into the thin aluminum skin of the external fuel tank, igniting the fireball that tore Challenger apart. The astronauts never had a chance. There was no escape system.

  NASA’s launch tower cameras had provided the first clue: a two-second series of puffs of black smoke emerging from the rocket joint at liftoff. Why it happened took a bit longer. No one correlated the O-rings to the cold temperatures at first.

  Sally, it turns out, delivered some of the earliest evidence.

  Someone—I still don’t know who—slipped her a report, three columns of print on one sheet of paper, measuring the resilience of the O-rings in cold temperatures versus warm. The results were unmistakable: launching in sub-freezing temperatures could be lethal, and management knew it. And yet they went ahead and did it. Sally understood the implications; she also knew that if the report were traced back through her, it could get the source fired. So on the evening of Friday, February 7, after a meeting—they had just been sworn in a few days earlier—she was walking down the basement corridor of the Old Executive Office Building with another commission member. Don Kutyna, a two-star Air Force general responsible for all its launch vehicles, had distinguished himself investigating an earlier Titan rocket crash. Sally described him in her notes as a “boyish, avid worker” who kept chocolate in his briefcase. Her kind of guy. Silently, Kutyna tells me, Sally “reached into her notebook and gave me the sheet of paper, enclosed in plastic.”