Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  “I had been planning to leave NASA after my third flight,” she later said. “From the day I entered the astronaut corps, I had planned to return to research in a university environment. I reevaluated that thinking in light of the accident. I decided to stay at NASA for an extra year, simply because it was a bad time to leave. I wanted to stay a while to help the recovery process.”

  Unaware of her exit strategy (as usual, Sally told no one, although her lack of engagement had fueled speculation in the astronaut corps), Fletcher hitched NASA’s biggest challenge to its brightest star, appointing her Special Assistant to the Administrator for Strategic Planning. In other words, Whither NASA? It was, Sally explained to me, a chance to “step back and look at the big picture, to help determine NASA’s goals beyond the space station.” She acknowledged with a laugh that the agency was being examined under a massive, unsolicited microscope. “We’ve been getting a lot of help from outside groups who say that NASA has no vision, no focus. And I think it’s fair to say that … we’ve definitely lost sight of what our goals are.”

  It was also a chance to figure out, Whither Sally? Having left Steve, she moved to Washington by herself (Tam was now teaching college biology in Atlanta) for what would be a full year. She rented an apartment in a two-story building on Capitol Hill—walking distance from the office—and furnished it from the Ikea store near Dulles airport. After spreading all the pieces on the floor and assembling her new shelves and chairs, she started to construct answers to the problem at NASA.

  In Houston, Carolyn Huntoon, whose concern for her female charges extended beyond the Johnson Space Center, figured that Sally might need someone at Headquarters to show her the ropes, “to take care of things that were not her top priority—getting an office, doing the paperwork, finding the resources, figuring out budgets. That’s not what she was brought there to do,” explains Alan Ladwig, a savvy program manager who had worked with Huntoon on some educational projects. Ladwig, an outspoken admirer of Sally’s who definitely needed a new job, was nonetheless wary. Several times, he’d been told, Sally had refused to allow the student experiments that Ladwig oversaw on her flights. And he still carried a grudge. So at their introductory meeting, he put it to her: “What did you have against student experiments?” Sally looked at him quizzically and said, “What are you talking about?” When Ladwig repeated the story, she said it wasn’t true, “This is the first I’m ever hearing about this.” Ladwig realized what had happened: “It’s just the way some people down at JSC will act if it’s something they don’t want to do. They’ll put the burden on an astronaut. Because Lord forbid anybody argue with an astronaut!”

  He also asked how her long-range planning report would be any different from all the ones already sitting on the shelves.

  Ladwig’s candor—along with his irreverence for bureaucracy and his sharp wit—matched Sally’s own, and she made him her trusted assistant. Their friendship and collaboration would last a quarter century, in the partnership she preferred. “I became her sidekick: Tonto to her Lone Ranger; Louise to her Thelma; Rhoda to her Mary,” Ladwig says good-naturedly. “Sally and I were opposite in many ways,” he says. “She was introverted and didn’t like giving presentations; I was mouthy, could talk all the time. But we got on the same page instantly.”

  Part of his job, he says, “was to help keep people away from her who were enchanted by the celebrity of Sally Ride. I was the gatekeeper. Everyone wanted to brief her, to hear what she had to say about the future of NASA. I had to be the filter of who was legitimate and who would waste her time. And Sally didn’t tolerate wasting time. I always thought she was driven to accomplish something every day.”

  Sally had been briefed by the administrator on the immense scope and delicate subtexts of her task: she would have to include the thinking of top management from each of the NASA centers; she would be dealing with disparate, disjointed groups, each of which had its own concept of where it fit in; she would have to reconcile what each group thought its role was with their view of the agency’s goals; she would have to anticipate questions from the public, from Congress, from the Reagan administration; and she would have to take into account the needs and plans of everyone from the US Air Force Space Command to the contractors for commercial satellites. She would, in effect, be rocketing beyond the space shuttle, even as its program was being restructured.

  Next to each of the sectors, Sally started to fill in names she might call on. In the same precise handwriting that had documented her post-STS-7 trip to Europe and her findings in the Challenger investigation, she listed the astronauts she most relied on (Crippen, Hauck, Fabian, and Steve Hawley), the NASA managers she still respected (Huntoon, Abbey) and some of her new pals from the Rogers Commission (Kutyna, Wheelon). One earned a separate line: “Neil—in Washington? Get advice/perspective.” (Some things never change. She spelled it “advise.”)

  Her early bullet points indicated the direction she was headed.

  • Agency doesn’t need another study—need an understanding and coalescing of current goals.

  • Space Shuttle is not a goal, but means to achieving several goals.

  • “Bold New Initiatives”

  Sally tapped NASA’s smartest brains to help formulate the most promising objectives. Previous studies were scrutinized and ranked for their application to the problem. Advocates had to defend their projects. And “when she didn’t understand something, she would ask very direct, open questions,” says John Niehoff, who was the lead scientist on the Mars proposal. “She wasn’t shy about her ignorance in certain subjects.”

  Early on, the possibilities were distilled to four likely options: send humans to Mars, build a human base on the Moon, study Earth from space, send robots to the outer planets. Sally remained neutral about which she preferred, a stance she may have had to defend. Mars was the well-known favorite of NASA administrator Fletcher, who—according to one scientist—walked into Sally’s office and told her to drop almost everything else. “And she just flat-out ignored him,” he says. Fletcher’s wasn’t the only partisan voice. “I think a lot of people wanted Mars to be the answer,” says Alan Ladwig. “The Apollo old guard wanted another hurrah, another major national goal, like the Moon, and they assumed that money would follow, that NASA would be the lead agency again.”

  Each sector clamored for its own pet project: “Pick Mars!” “Go to the Moon!” “Planet Earth!” “Robots!” Sally listened to them all, balancing the points of view. “She had a way of creating an environment where everyone had a voice,” says Al Diaz, who worked as a program manager in space science. Another NASA scientist calls her a classic leader: “She just exuded a quiet confidence. She’d provide encouragement. And yet she’d also push back and tell you when you were barking up the wrong tree. So she’d say, ‘Okay, getting people to Mars. Fine. But how do you start the process?’ ”

  Sally had learned well from the inclusive and transparent command of Bob Crippen on the space shuttle. “I spent a lot of time watching the way he worked, the way he learned things, and the way he worked with other people.” But she added her own unique touch. For instance: “She took a look at all the people assigned to various initiatives,” Ladwig recalls, “and she saw a bunch of old white men. And she thought, we need to get young people involved. So she asked Fletcher to put out a call for each center to nominate a young, up-and-coming engineer or scientist or whatever. She called it the 1A Task Group. What the hell that stood for, I don’t remember. But these were ten or eleven young people that she worked directly with. Up to that point, nobody really gave a damn about what young people thought.”

  The young people thought their trip through the skunk works was heaven.

  “Oh my god, it was beyond delightful!” recalls James Garvin, a self-described “career science geek” who joined the team as a thirty-year-old. “To be able to work with someone as heady as Sally, who really challenged us to think out of the box and to give her a framework, it was great! Sh
e took our little team, paraded us in front of the administrator. I mean, I was briefing the administrator, having been at NASA just three years. Sally gave us the ball to run with, whether it was crazy or not, and that was thrilling. And it really gave us a chance to see how the leadership of the agency worked.”

  Garvin, who would become Chief Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (its flagship science center and a hub for the engineering of science in space), compares Sally’s mandate to the fantasy element “unobtanium”—a nonexistent substance with impossibly perfect properties. “If the vision’s great but not realizable, then it’s really no good,” he says, recalling her directive. “It has to have enough legs to be sustainable. It was kind of like a graduate seminar in the future of space leadership—in my case, representing the science pull; for others, the engineering push, and even the communications aspect.” Communications was no small issue in 1986. Information was exchanged with face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and a baffling internal telemail system. There was no email, few computers, and status was defined by the quality of your typewriter. “If you had an IBM Selectric 3 with two elements,” recalls Alan Ladwig of the Cadillac of machines, “you were really something!”

  For Brian Muirhead, then a young engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL, headquarters for robotic deep space ventures), being part of the 1A Team occasioned his first visit to Goddard, where he joined the group seated in a real conference room—“long wooden table, fancy chairs and big windows.” But unlike the “graybeards,” he says, who did the previous studies that were watered down by the strategic planning process, “we were not to be held to a particular political standard. We were going to be the free agents, and Sally was going to be the Top Cover—like the military guys above you who cover for you while you go and do things you’re not meant to do.”

  It was a daring ploy in an agency whose risks tended to be taken beyond Earth’s atmosphere, not within the gravity of Washington’s boardrooms, but Sally wanted to bring some fresh air into an ailing system. It gave Muirhead, now chief engineer at JPL, “a pretty good dose of reality. It wasn’t quite a loss of innocence, but it was certainly a recognition that the nature of business in Washington is always a Faustian deal. The best ideas, the best intentions, the best strategies are rarely the ones that get picked, because there are forces that drive you in some suboptimum way. But I’m still an idealist—that’s true of all of our team—we were all idealists that Sally fostered and encouraged. And it was part of her nature as well.”

  Flying a desk had never been Sally’s dream, but in the post-Challenger downtime for the shuttle, it was a perfect transition. Crusader Rabbit was back on the job, this time saving the space agency.

  All adventures—especially into new territory—are scary …

  —Sally Ride, To Space and Back, 1986

  In October 1986, Sally’s first book was published, To Space and Back, an account of her flights written specifically for children. Her coauthor, Susan Okie, says that partnering on the manuscript was almost as much fun as the preliminary conversations. “Meeting with publishers was hilarious, because they all showed up thinking that they were bidding on her autobiography, The Sally Ride Story, and we had to disabuse them of that notion.” Instead, the book, which was Sally’s idea, answers basic questions about being weightless, sleeping in space, and yes, using the toilet. And “it explains exactly how I felt going into space,” she told a reporter. “The combination of pictures and words does it so much better than I could when I was standing up on a stage.” Sally included photographs of missions besides her own, to show other astronauts on the job. Publishers, she said, wanted to know “ ‘What was it like being the first woman in space?’ But I thought we could make the point that there are men and women astronauts very subtly, just by showing pictures of men and women working together in the space shuttle.”

  Under Okie’s prodding, Sally worked hard to make the experience of being launched understandable to her young audience. They dedicated the book to the memory of Elizabeth Mommaerts, the high school physiology teacher who had opened their teenaged minds. But just before it was ready to be printed, Challenger exploded, leading Sally and her publisher to reconsider the appropriateness of a book with smiling astronauts tumbling in weightlessness. “We both felt it was perfectly valid,” Sally said at publication. “Kids bounce back easily. When I go out to give a speech these days, kids don’t ask about the accident at all. They ask about future-oriented things … It’s the adults who ask about the accident and my reaction to it.” A second dedication was added, to the memory of the seven dead astronauts.

  While it may not have damaged American children, Challenger had blown up her relationship with her coauthor. After the accident (when the book was at the printer), Okie—who did not normally cover NASA—was pressed into service by her editors at the Washington Post to help report the story, and she contacted a number of the people she’d met while interviewing Sally for her pre–STS-7 series of articles. That’s what journalists do, especially in a crisis. But, Okie says, “Sally called me in a cold fury, just icy cold fury on the phone. And I don’t remember what she said but it was like, ‘Why are you calling my friends? You have no right to do that. Stop calling my friends.’ I mean, she was really, really furious. To her, it was a major betrayal. And I couldn’t even speak, I felt completely unable to fight back. I felt terrible, but I said, ‘Don’t you understand, this is my job? You asked me to come down as a reporter. What do you expect me to do in this situation?’ She wouldn’t speak to me for a long while after that.”

  More than half a year later, Okie came to Sally’s office at NASA Headquarters to sign books together for some friends. The first thing she noticed was how Sally had adapted to the system. “She was on and off the phone the whole time. And I remember hearing her organize the schedule for a meeting so that it would happen when some key person would be out of town and not able to attend. And I remember thinking, Wow, she’s turned into a bureaucrat, she knows how to work the Washington system here.”

  More troubling to Okie was the way her old friend dismissed her. She arrived with her children, still in a stroller, so Sally could see them. “And she completely ignored them,” Okie says, “and there was no sort of hashing out what had happened, there was never any really full conversation about why she’d been so mad. It was just like ice water, just chilly.”

  The hostility Okie witnessed was rare. Perhaps she noticed because she was better attuned to the woman she knew so well; perhaps it felt so harsh because she had violated Sally’s tacit No Trespassing rule at the agency she felt bound to protect. Other friends complain that without any obvious provocation, they might not hear from Sally for weeks, or months, or even years. That she’d ignore their calls and emails for long periods of time. And then she’d be back, friendly as ever. That happened to me, too. In time, Susan and Sally would also reestablish their relationship—although not quite, Okie says, to the level it once was. They would write no more books together.

  People who didn’t know Sally nearly as well never felt her wrath. She either avoided them or made up a story. In a series of interviews to promote her book in October 1986, Sally was the consummate NASA team player, declaring, in response to questions about her earlier bombshell to me, that with the agency’s new rules and with shuttle training about to resume, she now had “no qualms” about going up, that she was certainly willing to fly. But she must have had her fingers crossed behind her back when she told an audience of California college students that after her Washington assignment she would return to the astronaut corps. By then, she knew she was leaving. Make that the fingers of both hands when she was asked by a reporter, yet again, if she wanted to have children. “That’s something my husband and I keep to ourselves,” she said, with divorce proceedings already under way.

  DCA-ATL-DCA

  Weekends were for Tam. In the language of airport abbreviations, Sally was flying from Washington to Atlanta and ba
ck; or Tam came to visit her in the Capital, where they walked and ran around the Mall, visiting their favorite works by Degas, Calder and Rodin in the Hirschhorn Museum. They were especially partial to the sinuous bronzes by Henry Moore, inside and around the Sculpture Garden. At night, they’d walk to the pizza place for a pie with extra cheese, then stop at Bob’s Famous Homemade Ice Cream shop for two pints of Jamocha Almond Fudge to take home. While Sally worked on the future of NASA, Tam worked on her master’s degree in biology.

  At thirty-four, Sally had come to terms with the fact that she was in love with another woman. “She was fully committed, utterly with me in every respect,” Tam says. “There was no, ‘Oh, should I do this?’ She was there, physically, emotionally, mentally. I was surprised by how open Sally was, being a same-sex couple.” Tam describes the passion of their intimate life, showing me a small sculpture of two women embracing, that Sally commissioned as a present for her. “Sally was very affectionate, very loving,” Tam says.

  Privately, Sally was embarking on a partnership for life. Publicly, she was still the loyal astronaut.

  THE RIDE REPORT

  Over the course of the yearlong study, Sally pushed her team for the best possible scenarios, editing and rewriting various drafts through many review processes. “She would call at the very tail end of the workday, when I’d already been at it for fourteen hours,” says Terri Niehoff, a technical writer based in Chicago who was the report’s official editor. “And she’d say, ‘I know you’re going to be mad, but I want to fit one more paragraph in.’ And I’d say, ‘Sally, we’re at the end of the page. If I add a paragraph we’re going to have to take one out.’ And she’d say, ‘Okay,’ and would work on it. She would not say, ‘You figure it out, I’m outta here.’ She would stay and work late, and it was later for her than for me.” Sally, she says, was aiming for precision. “She would argue with me between using an ‘a’ versus a ‘the,’ the singular versus the all-inclusive. She didn’t want to give an impression that she didn’t want to give. And because a lot of the input was coming from other people, she had to filter that, and put her own voice on it.”