Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Kids were moving further and further to the forefront of Sally’s concern. She was a frequent visitor to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, where the enrollment of girls shot up from 8 percent to 30 percent when her first flight was announced. One 1993 camper, Chelsea Clinton, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the U.S. president, was so “awestruck” by Sally’s presence during her keynote address, she heard nothing she said, a valuable lesson to Clinton to rein in her enthusiasm until after the speech is over.

  By then Sally had cofounded a series of summer workshops on climate change for graduate students and master teachers (that would reverberate back to the classroom) at Caltech, “to bring scientific understanding to a national conversation on climate change that was already spinning toward a political battle,” according to planetary scientist and now JPL’s (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) chief scientist Dan McCleese. “Her first flight in space changed her enormously,” he tells me. “She had this strong desire to be more than a witness, wanting to contribute knowledge as well as perspective.”

  The irony is worth noting. Sally, who never wanted her own children, was making them the focus of the rest of her life. Was she remembering the happy, intellectually privileged times of her own childhood? Paying forward the treasure of her own success? Or simply caught up in the excitement of awakening young minds, and, professionally, planning for the future? Again, no explanation from Sally about her feelings towards her audience. But now, it was all for them. The royalties from her first children’s book in 1987 (an impressive $12,400, that she was not permitted to keep as a NASA employee) had been donated to a charity, the Children’s Defense Fund.

  • • •

  She would write the rest of her children’s books with Tam—six lively scientific adventures about Earth and space: Voyager (1992), Third Planet (1994), Mystery of Mars (1999)—with an artist’s conception of a female astronaut on the Martian surface; Exploring Our Solar System (2003); Mission Planet Earth and Mission Save the Planet (2009). The lightbulb that had gone off in their brains with the discovery of the Asimov book at Stanford grew into their own version of science for kids, a literary partnership to illuminate the field for youngsters. “Sally always said that she was the better editor, and I was the better writer,” Tam says, describing their collaboration with matching laptops, stretched out on the living room carpet, surrounded by photographs and story boards and colored pens. “We would brainstorm an outline, then we would divvy up the essays to write.” Sally did the physics and space science, Tam the biology and chemistry. Both worked on geology and Earth science. They would each write separately, then read their drafts aloud, a “fun and scary ritual over a cup of tea.” During months of back-and-forth reading, writing and editing, they’d craft the whole book, choosing photographs and sketching out illustrations to educate young readers while grabbing their attention. The results are as informative as they are charming.

  For Voyager, Tam came up with the idea of telling the story through the eyes of the two spindly spacecraft. For Mission Planet Earth, they explained the effect of water and carbon dioxide by having kids follow a single atom or molecule on its journey around the planet:

  Let’s follow a carbon atom as it travels around the planet. We’ll pick one that’s part of a carbon dioxide molecule just entering the air—maybe exhaled by a sleeping dog. It would ride the winds for about ten years and travel around the world several times. During this time, it would make its tiny contribution to Earth’s greenhouse effect. Then one spring day, it might float into a minuscule hole in a leaf hanging on a tree. It would be carried in a watery stream inside the leaf’s veins into a green chloroplast—the part of a cell where photosynthesis takes place. Wham! The carbon dioxide molecule is attacked from all sides by other molecules. First, the oxygen atoms are stripped away from our carbon atom. Then, hydrogen, other carbon atoms, and new oxygen atoms are stuck on. Now our carbon atom is part of a sugar molecule inside the leaf.

  A hungry mouse might eat the leaf …

  —Mission Planet Earth

  Sally’s excitement about the books was evident in every signed copy. She sent me The Third Planet: Exploring the Earth from Space—an engaging and literate early look at Earth as a system—and playfully apologized for not including something close to my home where she’d visited: “Sorry, no pictures of Long Island …” She also tucked in a copy of the research paper she’d just coauthored, “Nonlinear Thomson Scattering of Intense Laser Pulses from Beams and Plasmas.” Her note advised, “Read whichever you prefer!” My choice was apparently the same as that of the American Institute of Physics, which honored Third Planet with its prestigious Science Award in 1995.

  THE SPEECH

  Sally didn’t need to do any more research papers. Her credentials as a professor were secure, and her passion for science education and its advocacy was becoming more than a sideline. All this as her voice was sought on an increasing variety of platforms. For big bucks.

  UCSD’s Richard Somerville teased Sally about her work outside the ivory tower. “I told her that playing around with NASA toys and Space Camp was not going to get her academic advancement. And she looked at me as if I were mentally handicapped and she said, ‘Richard, if I need money, I give a talk!’ She had figured out that she didn’t have to conform to every academic norm, that her celebrity had insulated her against some of the pressures.” And that being a famous astronaut did, indeed, have its benefits.

  Over her lifetime, she would make hundreds, maybe thousands, of speeches, from Hartford, Connecticut, to Fullerton, California; for L’Oréal and Nestlé, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman, the Girl Scouts and Glamour magazine, ultimately earning up to $25,000 per lecture. Her talks would evolve as her career expanded, from her venture on the shuttle to the demands of equity for women; from the lessons of Challenger to corporate risk management; from the value of sports to the necessity of science education. But most still began or ended with the perennial crowd pleaser. “Not to worry,” she emailed an upcoming host who was concerned that her speech might not touch on the obvious. “I ALWAYS show my slides and talk about space! We could use the title, ‘Reach for the Stars,’ which allows me to talk about … anything.”

  The slides were travel snaps from on high, her shuttle’s eye view of planet Earth, a constant jaw-dropper for the audience and an endless source of ribbing between Sally and me. “Have you seen my slides?” she’d ask innocently, telling me about her latest conquest of a sold-out auditorium. Um, yes, Sally, more than a few times. The thing is, they never got old.

  But for all her skill and experience, it never got easy, never became rote.

  “I would see her nervous, and I would see her sweating it,” says Karen Flammer. “And I would be on the plane flying back east, and I would see her going over her notes, putting her earbuds in, or her Bose earphones to tune everything out, and I would think to myself, ‘Now, Sally, you’ve given that talk like fifty thousand times.’ I think she took great pride in what she did and in doing it well. But no, I don’t think it ever came easy.”

  Unlike so many of us who give speeches all the time, Sally did not have a template of her presentation sitting on her hard drive, ready to freshen up and print out for a new venue at a moment’s notice. Instead, she handwrote her outline each time—often the evening before, beneath letterheads from the Waldorf-Astoria, the Arizona Biltmore, the Ritz-Carlton at Buckhead, or whatever she found on the hotel nightstand. She’d jot down bullet points of the trailblazing flight whose timeline was etched in her brain; she’d note the same reliable family anecdotes (“Dad didn’t know what an astrophysicist did!” “Mom said one of us would get to heaven!”); and she’d painstakingly sculpt a set of data points to connect with whatever audience she was facing. Once on stage she was fine, safe with familiar words and thoughts, where no one could get to her. “Sally said the only time she felt like she was alone was when she was standing in front of a podium, about to give a speech,” Susan Okie tells me. “Isn’t that weird?”
Yes. And to get to that refuge, before every performance, this innate introvert who had seen Earth from outer space—a planet holding seven billion humans—needed to steel herself, to quell her constant anxieties about appearing before a crowd of several thousand. Deep breath, relax the shoulders, calm the nerves.

  “It took a lot out of her,” Tam says. “I said, ‘Why don’t you stop doing this?’ But she couldn’t help her middle-class upbringing. She always thought the speeches would dry up.” Of course, they never did.

  Money had never been Sally’s priority, which worked out well with her earliest years as a wage earner. As a graduate student with TA gigs, she was lucky to get peanut butter money; at NASA, her government salary topped out at $59,212. At UCSD, her twin appointments finally lifted her to the low six figures. With the books and the speeches and her election to a number of corporate boards, she was starting to see her income shoot up. “Now that I am out of the government, and becoming more of a capitalist …” she wrote to one of her editors, she was willing to consider more book signing appearances. And more outside ventures. Sally liked watching her bank account grow as she assembled the pieces of the big project in her mind. It was almost ready. Meanwhile, what else was out there?

  SPACE.COM

  It sounded like a great idea.

  Lou Dobbs was on the phone telling Sally about his new start-up, Space.com, a website to aggregate news and background about space and science; one that would bring outer space to cyberspace. “I was enthralled by the possibilities,” she told a reporter at the time. “This is a great opportunity. I’ve enjoyed communicating to the public, and the internet is the medium of the next millennium.”

  Sally did her homework, calling me and others in the media for information on Dobbs, who had just left CNN and was tapping into deep pockets in the financial community. And although, as she told me, she got less than rave reviews about her potential new boss as an office mate, she was impressed with his contacts and vision. And she signed on as president of the new venture. It was September 1999, and anything online had a golden aura. “Never underestimate the value of stock options,” she said, only half-joking, to writer Andy Chaikin, as they shared a limo to the airport after work one day.

  “It was the dot-com era,” explains Alan Ladwig, who set up a Space.com office in Washington. “Lou raised all this money, had a genuine interest in space. It was exciting to be part of that, part of the ground floor.” That was figurative. The new start-up occupied fancy offices on the thirty-fifth floor of a building at Times Square—with, according to one employee, a great view of the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve.

  Sally’s job, he said, was “to be the name, to legitimize Lou Dobbs’s plans.”

  Which were?

  “That would be the problem,” Ladwig goes on. “He wanted to be all things in the space media content. And that ended up to be the hard thing to figure out. What was that? And how to make money out of it? He never quite figured it out.”

  Dobbs, who did not respond to numerous requests to be interviewed for this book, was described by a number of Space.com employees as a smart risk-taker and a demanding boss who could also terrify employees in what several called “a toxic environment.” Figuratively and literally. With antismoking laws firmly in place, Dobbs regularly lit up in his own office, according to eyewitnesses. And what some call his verbally abusive manner—especially insulting and humiliating to women, they say—sent more than one to the ladies’ room in tears.

  Never Sally, although she did wind up putting out some of the stress fires.

  “She was the voice of reason, and she really took good care of us,” says Emily Sachar, Space.com’s editor-in-chief, who found Sally “extraordinarily present, in the weeds with us. She was not a figurehead president, she was very much there.” One of her first innovations was an adjunct education website called SpaceKids. Another was to ban the use of the word manned from the domain.

  Mitchell Cannold, the company’s chief operating officer, says, “Lou may not have realized that he was getting more than Sally Ride the astronaut. She was central to building the strategic partnerships”—with NASA or the aerospace industry—“and understood how to make it a teaching tool for a younger audience.”

  Sally relished her new position and for most of 1999–2000, threw herself into the work, commuting several days a week from Atlanta (she’d taken a leave from UCSD), where Tam was doing research and teaching graduate students. Early on, my apartment in New York was her hotel, and I saw the first inklings of corporate longings in my friend. She told me about the site’s “pages” and “unique visitors” and prospects for future growth, at a time when such concepts about the internet were just entering the language. She was also refining her management style, with healthy doses of both encouragement and humor. When journalist Todd Halvorson was hired to open the Space.com bureau at Cape Canaveral, he hung a sign on the new office—a construction trailer in the Kennedy Space Center Press Site parking lot—reading “Sally K. Ride Executive Office Building.” Sally sent him an autographed picture reading, “Get back to work!”

  So what went wrong? It may have been Sally’s disillusionment with the way the business was being run. Or her inability to get certain initiatives going. Or, according to one colleague, because “she found herself doing too much damage control, so it wasn’t as much fun as she thought she needed it to be.”

  Or maybe it was the day she held a meeting in her glassed-in office. Dobbs was there, along with some other executives, as well as Karen Flammer, Sally’s friend and UCSD colleague, whom she’d hired as a consultant to validate the science articles posted on the site. Flammer doesn’t recall the topic that day but says Sally was frustrated with Dobbs, with the organization, with how things were done, even before the meeting began. Her jaws were tight, her teeth clenched. “And you could just tell. But she didn’t say anything.” Flammer also knew Sally as a levelheaded listener who never interrupted while someone else spoke. That day, it was different.

  “They’re talking,” she says, “and it’s going back and forth, and all of a sudden, Sally picks up her notebook and slams it down and shouts, ‘Everybody, right now, get out of my office!’ ”

  It was, Flammer says, very dramatic. And very loud. She had never seen Sally get angry before. She had never heard Sally raise her voice. No one had. The room cleared. “And I sat there and said, in a very small voice, ‘Do you mean me too?’ ” Sally said no, that Flammer should stay. But she never said another word about the flare-up. Never discussed it. “She just needed time to cool off,” Flammer tells me. “That is the only time in seventeen years I ever saw her like that.”

  Sally’s flare-up was more than rare. She had been icy to her friend Susan Okie when Okie’s journalistic responsibilities had, Sally thought, compromised their friendship; she had occasionally frozen out other friends or colleagues for a variety of reasons; she would, from time to time, clam up with her closest friends. But a full blown rant, even a brief one, was unknown. Much later, when reminded about it by Flammer, Sally would acknowledge that it happened. But she never explained why.

  Not too long after the incident, in July 2000, Sally resigned from Space.com. It was widely viewed as a loss to the company, which, several days later, was restructured. Some 20 percent of the staff was laid off. The venture, in the words of one employee, “was extravagantly funded but intrinsically flawed.” Dobbs went back on television.

  Sally went back to Atlanta, and soon after, she and Tam moved permanently back to La Jolla. There would be no stock options, no fortune. But she still had her speeches and her teaching job and her boards. She also, she thought, had a better idea for a business.

  10

  *

  SALLY RIDE SCIENCE

  JANUARY 2001–MARCH 2011

  Sally Ride Science Festival, Atlanta, 2002.

  Her hair fell into a short, sleek pageboy now, and her suit was a smart tweed, more corporate than astronaut. So when Sally Ride checked int
o a hotel one evening, the clerk didn’t recognize her. When he saw how she’d signed the register, he looked up, astonished, and asked, “What’s it like to have the same name as a famous person?”

  CEO

  Sally had refused countless opportunities to link the fame of her name to a commercial product. Not just the biographies and the movies-of-the-week, but the posters and the authorized tee-shirts. There were no Sally Ride dolls, no candy bars. She wasn’t a purist—she had endorsed a study skills game and made all those speeches—but her instinct was always to decline. On her way to turning fifty, Sally found a way to make her celebrity meaningful.

  “Sally called me late one night,” says Karen Flammer, “and she said to me, ‘Karen, I want to start a company, are you in?’ And before I said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘Of course I’m in.’ ”

  So were Terry McEntee, Sally’s longtime executive assistant; Alann Lopes, a computer programmer, and Tam. Sally and Tam had been discussing the idea for some time, how to turn their passion for connecting girls with science, into a business.

  This is what Sally had been building up to. Being first was fine, but she didn’t want be the only one. She wanted to awaken young female minds to the wonder of science that had captivated her; she wanted to inspire and insure the next generation of America’s mathematicians and engineers and physicists and astronauts. She wanted to teach them, as she’d been taught, that if you’re a girl, you can do anything. She wanted them to see, as she had, beyond the stereotypes. And she wanted to make it a business, a business that would make money, because that would attract the talent to make it work.

  The plan was ambitious: provide science events, programs and products “to support and sustain,” as the mission statement reads, “girls’ natural interests in science and technology, and to catalyze a change in cultural perceptions of girls and women in these endeavors.” Writer K. C. Cole gave Sally credit for “making sure that girls get to share in the adventure that is science.”