Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Sally’s teaching skill was evident to her sister years earlier. “When she came back from Swarthmore and was living at home for a while, I was struggling with Algebra 3 or whatever it was,” Bear says. “And I didn’t get it. And she just sat down and taught it to me patiently, and with kindness, and I thought, whoa! She was a fabulous teacher.”

  That was also the opinion of most of her UCSD students, who gave Sally nearly perfect grades in the uncensored listings by CAPE (Course and Professional Evaluations), the student-run organization that collects feedback on the faculty. Although a small number found her “presentations listless” in Electricity and Magnetism, she clearly had learned something from her Stanford Professor Schwartz, with quizzes that “taxed them severely.” Mostly, her courses, in the Zagat-like CAPE syntax, were “enthralling,” “top-notch,” offering a “unique perspective,” and Professor Ride “charmed students” with “mesmerizing lectures” and “lucid explanations” of “stimulating material.” One class was “tremendously engaging” with midterms that were “a breeze.” Sally, wrote a student exuberantly, “undressed extraterrestrial physics until it stood there buck naked for everyone to comprehend.” That, like most of her raves, was for Physics 6 (Physics of Space Science and Exploration, or Physics for Non-Physics Majors) which Sally called “Physics for Poets,” a nickname she lifted from the Stanford catalogue. Even I might have understood the concepts with exam questions like this:

  Design a scale model of the solar system. Let UCSD’s Main Library [a decidedly angular structure] represent the Sun (assume that the library is a sphere(!), 50 meters in diameter). Now, to create the “solar system”: (1) pick objects of roughly the right size (compared to the library) to represent the planets, then (2) put your “planets” the proper distance away from the “sun.”

  What objects would you choose for the planets, and roughly where (in terms of reasonably familiar locations like WLH [Warren Lecture Hall], downtown San Diego, etc.) would you put them?

  “She could articulate and explain things in laymen’s terms that just made sense,” says Joanna Rice, a public relations executive who says her work with health care products has been informed by the science she learned from Sally in one of the big lecture halls back in 1993. “It was almost a logic class. And she made it clear that no question is a stupid question. She wouldn’t roll her eyes and look at you and say, ‘What part of this aren’t you getting?’ ”

  There were, she says, things you couldn’t get away with. “If someone came in late, she’d give them this cold look, and she’d stop and wait for them to get situated. And she’d be looking at them the whole time, like, ‘Why are you late to my class?’ And then she’d say, ‘Okay, are you ready?’ And you couldn’t b.s. her about not getting your assignments in. She wasn’t cool about that. But she was cool about, ‘I can teach you physics.’ ”

  Mike Baine was so inspired by Sally as an undergraduate, he changed his major from electrical engineering to physics. “This,” he explains, joking, “is part of what her students later referred to as the Sally Ride Distortion Field. She would be able to instill a level of confidence in her students to do things that they would not attempt on their own.” Sally, he says, “made it look so easy. She empowered a level of responsibility within her students that was well outside the norm. It was successful because there was no way that we were going to disappoint her. And when we did figure things out that she was particularly proud of, you could really hear it in her voice. You could hear the pride and the ownership, that what we produced did work.” Baine says her enthusiasm “was contagious. It was hard to leave a meeting with her without feeling wide-eyed optimism for the future.”

  Baine’s comments were repeated to me over and over by Sally’s students and friends alike: they didn’t want to disappoint her, to let her down, to land beneath her own high bar. And it wasn’t just science.

  Sally became Baine’s doctoral advisor (one of only a handful of grad students she took on), spending hours in her sparely furnished physics office on the top floor of Mayer Hall going through draft after draft of his thesis. She was as tough on his grammar as his physics, wielding a red marker like a surgeon. “She really cared about all aspects of her students’ work,” Baine says. “And took the time to make sure that we were producing the best work that we could. And that it should meet a basic standard before we submitted it to the world.” In other words, that it should meet the expectations she set for herself.

  Once again, Sally was exactly where she belonged. Or back where she belonged. Baine, who became a chief engineer at NASA, saw it firsthand. “She was a scientist first,” he tells me. “A scientist who took a detour through space.”

  INSIDE THE BELTWAY

  And a scientist who wanted to help.

  Sally testified numerous times before congressional panels, with the aplomb first noticed by Brian Muirhead, who had accompanied her to Capitol Hill in 1987 when she briefed members on the upcoming Ride Report. “Here we are in a big congressional meeting room, with a small army of the press putting their giant lenses about four inches from her face,” Muirhead recalls. “And she just didn’t blink. I could see the astronaut in her.” Muirhead also noticed that “she was probably very glad to be done with it!”

  She was often invited to explain Mission to Planet Earth. Before one hearing with the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, its powerful chairman, Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, announced that he wanted assurances it would provide more than just “a better weather report.” After Sally’s appearance, Hollings called the program “the most challenging and exciting concept that this committee has seen in quite some time.”

  Legislators on both sides of the aisle regularly contacted her for input into their pet bills. “Please call and let’s get together next time you’re in town,” scrawled Senator Barbara Mikulski at the bottom of one official letter. “I need your help and advice.” It was the influence Sally had hoped for. But if she enjoyed her role as a political advisor—and the occasional accompanying ego trip—she detested the bureaucracy. She saw it more as her civic responsibility—giving back to the government that had gotten her into space.

  In 1992, when a presidential commission was convened to clarify the role of women in the nation’s armed forces (women had served in some combat roles but without official sanction), Sally was also asked to testify. Although she could not be there in person, she sent a supportive statement that was read into the record by her friend and STS-7 crewmate, Rick Hauck, who was also testifying. Her experience in “the predominantly male Astronaut Corps,” she wrote, having “twice been part of a close, primarily male team, confined in close quarters in a life-threatening situation,” was relevant to the military situation. As was the camaraderie that the crew developed. “Space shuttle crews provide ample evidence that this camaraderie can be achieved and maintained as easily on mixed crews as on all-male crews … The fact that we were a mixed crew caused no problems and had no adverse effect on our routine or on our performance.”

  Her voice was the stamp of authority; her name, the magnet that could fill a meeting room. Or better. More than one political operative drooled at the prospect of the first American woman in space becoming a candidate for office. During the 1984 presidential primary, when a crush of candidates flooded the Democratic field (including astronaut-turned-senator John Glenn), a political cartoon considered the possibility. “And in the latest presidential straw poll,” announces the TV anchorman in the caption, “Cranston, Hollings, Mondale, Hart, Glenn and Askew were stunned by Sally Ride who captured 89 percent of the vote.” In 1992, when third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot was looking for a vice president, a bemused colleague left a phone message slip on Sally’s desk telling her that a UPI reporter had called “re: rumor that Ross Perot has asked you to be his running mate!!(??)”

  Don’t, as they say, hold your breath. Sally had no interest in opening her life to public scrutiny or conforming to
the ponderous ways of Washington. What she did enjoy was using her analytical skills at very high levels, as with the Technology Assessment Advisory Council to the Office of Technology Assessment, on classified and less secret studies relating to national security. In October 1992, she joined a prominent group of scientists and engineers endorsing the Clinton-Gore presidential ticket. When the Democrats were elected, Sally led their science and technology transition team, which meant analyzing the status of the Federal Communications Commission, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Space Council (a modified version of the group LBJ had chaired thirty years earlier, when he alleged he was powerless to help put women in space) and NASA. It was an immense responsibility for a new administration, whose party had been out of power for a dozen years. What were the issues? Who were the key personnel? Sally, whose year at NASA Headquarters had left her unimpressed with the egocentric culture of the capital, was nonetheless excited about the challenge. From her office on Vermont Avenue, she issued a report dealing with everything from cultural diversity to the availability of travel vouchers, and recommended, among other things, a strong emphasis on education to prepare “the cadre of scientists and engineers needed for America’s future.”

  Her December 1992 memo on NASA was more specific. The shuttle program had moved ahead since Challenger, with the successful return to space in September 1988 on Discovery. New astronauts had been named, including the first two female test pilots. And a new orbiter, Endeavour, had joined the fleet to replace the one that was lost. Still, Sally reported, NASA faced a number of urgent problems, from “confused” planning to “a shortage of women and minorities in its senior management positions” to money woes. President George H. W. Bush had announced the goal of sending humans to Mars, but Congress had provided no funding. Mission to Planet Earth required “rapid increases in budget.” The entire space agency was underfunded and “in turmoil … The appointment of an Administrator is critical.”

  If you didn’t know Sally, you’d have thought she was lobbying for the job. The word on the street was that she was practically sworn in. She was not. According to a member of the transition team who prefers to remain anonymous, both President-elect Clinton and Vice President-elect Gore telephoned her several times to request her to be the new NASA Administrator. Each time, she said no. Al Gore doesn’t remember the specifics, but Alan Ladwig, Sally’s executive assistant on the transition team, recalls a conversation with her one day: “What’s the latest: are you going to be the administrator?”

  “No, I turned it down.”

  “I thought that when the president asks, you can’t turn down the job.”

  “Well, at seven-thirty this morning I turned down the job.”

  Richard Somerville, her colleague in La Jolla, found himself answering phone queries from the press when they couldn’t find Sally, asking what her demands were. “And I said to her, ‘What do I tell them?’ And she said, ‘I’m not interested in that position. There are no demands. No means no.’ And I’d paraphrase that for the reporters.”

  With the rumors flying, Carolyn Huntoon once asked Sally what it would take to get her to accept the big job. “If they’d move it to California,” she deadpanned.

  “I remember thinking at the time, it was too bad,” says the transition team member who told me about the offers, “because she’s one of the toughest, most single-minded people.” But she wasn’t waffling, he says. “She never wanted to come into the system. Her service on the team was good citizenship that she donated.”

  “Sally was so committed to the public good that she never put herself ahead of the mission,” says John Holdren, who served as a science advisor to the Clinton-Gore administration. “It was always about what she could do with her talents to make a better world. So we found ways to exploit her in a part-time capacity.” She did agree to become one of eighteen members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a group of private-sector individuals from business, education and research organizations. Over a period of five years, she flew to Washington every few months or so for presentations and studies of national issues, sometimes with the president or vice president at the table. Early on, with the fall of the USSR and worldwide concern over the safeguarding of nuclear weapons and fissile materials, and partly because of her experience with CISAC at Stanford, the president named Sally to a special PCAST panel chaired by Holdren to review the risk that such materials could be stolen from inadequately protected facilities in Russia and end up in the hands of rogue states or terrorists. The subject matter was critical for U.S. security, and Sally had the required clearances for the intelligence materials. The report that resulted was classified: only an overview was presented in open hearings to a Senate subcommittee, and one member of the full PCAST recalls having to get special clearance for a briefing in a White House basement room. The findings led President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin to agree on measures that sharply reduced the danger; in the words of one report, “to make the world a safer place.”

  EARTHKAM

  There was another way to protect the planet.

  What if kids could see Earth the way it looks from space? What if they could not only see Earth, but home in on it as if they were aliens exploring a new planet? And what if they could take pictures of Earth—close-ups of any spot on the globe—from their own desks, the way astronauts did while in orbit? Seeing the big picture was a first step to solving its problems.

  “We came up with the idea of putting a camera onboard the space shuttle, aimed at Earth, that could be controlled by middle-school kids from their classrooms,” Sally explained about the 1995 project. “It combined just the ‘gee whiz’ of the space program with the actual hands-on involvement for the kids.” She described it as “giving kids a piece of the space program.”

  They called it KidSat, then EarthKAM (the precursor of MoonKAM), for Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students. NASA spent close to $1 million per year to fly it on five shuttle missions, then moved it to the permanent platform of the new International Space Station, which started operations in 2000. It’s Mission to Planet Earth, youth version. In class, students learn the orbital track of the Space Station and determine what regions or features they want to capture in the available path. Close-ups of the destruction wrought by hurricane Katrina? Evidence of melting glaciers? A bird’s-eye view of their hometown? Then they find the proper longitude and latitude, calculate when the Station will be in range, and key in the coordinates on the EarthKAM website, checking the weather to be sure no clouds will block the shot. At Mission Control in San Diego—a specially constructed chamber at the Science Engineering Research Facility (SERF), with three rows of consoles that Sally modeled after the real thing in Houston—the information is processed by UCSD students who get course credit and real-time experience dealing with NASA engineers. They process the requests and send them to the Johnson Space Center, where the officer at the Space Station EarthKAM desk relays them up to the Space Station, circling the planet some 250 miles high.

  There, a dedicated high-resolution digital camera, facing out a window of super-optical quality glass, is connected to a laptop computer. When the commands reach the computer, the camera shutter is snapped. Then the recorded bits of data flow back down the chain so that finished images can be posted on the internet, ready for a serious Earth science report. It is efficient, it is cutting edge, and it is empowering children.

  “You mean, the real shuttle? In space?” asks a fifth-grader about to try it for the first time.

  “Any time a teacher can make something real for the kids, real and exciting,” says Diane Bowen, who used the program in her Brunswick, Maine, classes, “then they say, ‘Well, I can do this.’ It’s about giving them the experience.” One of her students is now getting her master’s in science education; another is a math teacher.

  Karen Flammer, the UCSD space
physicist who helped Sally develop the program and now runs it, says the college students were equally energized. “They developed all the code, did all the work, all the supervision. And I saw that it was a better experience for them than anything they’ve ever done in the classroom.” Sally’s presence, she says, made the difference. “I saw what she would elicit out of people. You get the sense of what she expected out of herself, and somehow it seeps out of her to everybody.” Even to Flammer, a third-generation physicist. “I stopped doing my research and I just said, I want to do educational outreach for the rest of my life.”

  Sally saw it as the first step to fix the problems she had seen from the shuttle.

  “The next generation, the kids in school today, know a lot about climate change,” she said. “They’re concerned about it, they’re interested in it. They want information about it, and they see it as a challenge to them, to help develop those solutions, and help understand the science, develop the new technologies.” The kids, she said, “are so committed to this that it’s making science and engineering cool again.”