Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Martin said having different personalities was important, because you never want to have two leaders the same. “I’m from Chicago. I believe you do kick a person when they’re down!” she tells me, laughing. “But Sally knew how to ask the right questions—not like a congressional ‘I’m gonna get you.’ More like, ‘Hey, wait a minute, how does this work over seven years?’ She knew how to make sure the question wasn’t loaded to get someone, but was loaded to get a response. She understood the corporate mind-set.”

  Just as she did at her own company.

  THE COMPANY

  Sally had become commander of her own Earthbound spacecraft. Management was a constantly developing skill, further expanding what she’d learned from her shuttle commander, Bob Crippen, and practiced only briefly at NASA Headquarters and at Space.com. She was a quick study and had Crip’s ability to do everything. Eager to get started—but economically—she emailed Terry McEntee to find “the cheapest/easiest (i.e., doesn’t take much of our time) ways to get things like business cards, furniture, quotes for services, etc.” She met with potential funders, attended conferences of math and science teachers, assimilated the vernacular of education—procurement dates for products, state by state, grade by grade—and could turn on a dime. When an opportunity arose for a deal with McGraw-Hill, a major player, in New York, she flew in with a team that made a detailed pitch. Lawyers were standing by to write the contracts.

  She practiced everything with her colleagues, treated every conference like a first-time encounter. The meetings with her shareholders made her particularly anxious. She would rehearse with her cofounders and board members, reviewing their—and her own—remarks during repeated dry runs.

  Sally Ride Science, built on the sponsorship model, got more investors and more corporate sponsors. Under Tam’s supervision (she had retired from San Diego State University to work fulltime at SRS, where she would become its chief operating officer), they developed Cool Careers in Science, a series of books on everything from microbiology to veterinary medicine, geology to engineering, green chemistry to Earth science. Each of the dozen books features kid-friendly profiles of scientists made human, with dogs and cats and hobbies like skiing. Most of the scientists are women. “We’re putting a female face on every one of these careers,” Sally said. Another set of books breathes life into the physical, earth and life sciences. The library is more than eighty-strong.

  And because national studies also revealed that most science teachers in kindergarten through eighth grade had little or no formal science schooling, they set up a series of weeklong summer teacher training academies to infuse selected educators with the strategies and enthusiasm to train others back home, who would then teach kids. In one activity, educators were given a box with the top glued shut and asked to figure out what was inside. They could shake it, slide it, gauge the weight and the shape—any kind of scientific method. But they were never told the answer. The point: to arouse their curiosity as a way of stimulating them to arouse their kids’ curiosity in science class. Science as fun, science as logic, from the top down.

  Sally convinced ExxonMobil to fund each Sally Ride Science Academy for $1 million a year, which Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil’s vice president of public and government affairs, described as his own company’s self-interest. “I asked to meet with her in connection with the work we were doing in STEM,” he says. “We wanted to start having an impact with young women and girls in that field. We employ scientists and engineers and we want a diverse group of people, we wanted to encourage more young girls and women to go into that field,” he tells me. “It’s important for the country. And as you know, it’s an area where Sally was a rarity. She was very clear what she wanted to accomplish in putting these academies together. And she truly had a passion to see other youngsters follow her path. She tried to understand what our goals were and we tried to understand hers—trying to find the sweet spot between what we both were trying to accomplish. It was easy to partner with Sally.”

  Not so easy, perhaps, for an environmentally proactive company like Sally Ride Science, run by folks who wanted to save our “fragile planet,” to link up with an oil behemoth. Tam calls it “one of those compromises you do in business. But these people really care about STEM education, and they put their money behind this.” Sally usually acknowledged the unlikely alliance during her keynote address at the Academies. She would make a wry comment about “oil spills” or “oily money,” with a grin and a glance towards the ExxonMobil rep in the room. And then, just as she’d always done, she’d move on.

  Sally also got Hasbro, the toy company, to sponsor an annual toy design competition, called TOYchallenge, involving several thousand kids from around the country, a playful way to teach the engineering process. A documentary by filmmaker Dori Berinstein, Some Assembly Required, captures the excitement in 2006 as teams of middle schoolers brainstorm and then build their entries: a punching bag with flashing electronic lights; a wacky baseball game for the swimming pool; a boogie board with a built-in face mask. They learn as much about teamwork and cooperation as they do about electronic circuits. As one youngster from a Harlem team says after they win the prize for team spirit, not for their treasure hunt game, “We didn’t get all of heaven, but we got a piece.”

  Sally’s new mission generated its own missionary zeal, fairly oozing out of the La Jolla office during my visit in October 2012. Technically, it’s in the basement—one flight below the main floor in a medium-high-rise building in a mini industrial center. But the budget digs have plenty of floor-to-ceiling windows to bring in the California light, with mobiles of seahorses, dolphins and other playful creatures giving it a middle-school atmosphere populated by instructors who grew up learning about Sally in their history texts.

  Leesa Hubbard, who left her teaching job in Tennessee to work with SRS (and who has the circular NASA logo known as “the meatball” tattooed on her hip), says simply, “It feels good to work here. I feel like I get to be Santa Claus for teachers.” Sandy Antalis, who served as director of professional development, went to the company because of Sally. “The first time I heard her, she spoke so passionately about the next generation of children,” she says. “If you weren’t on board before that, you were signing in blood afterwards. I had tears in my eyes.” Brenda Wilson, who served as vice president of content, says it started at the top. “Normally you get a job and see that the emperor has no clothes,” she says. “With Sally it was the opposite: she got better, she grew in stature.”

  The hagiography is discomfiting, except that I hear it over and over.

  Meredith Manning, the company’s former vice president of marketing, says the kids were the reward. “The fact that Sally could have done anything, and that she chose to put her name on, and all of her credentials behind, STEM education, that is very, very powerful. And you go to the festivals, and you hear from a girl who has never been on a college campus, or never met a scientist, and the light that shines in her face. Wow. That’s why I do this!”

  That’s what drove Sally too, and it was clear from the decorations in her corner office. Her only visible souvenir of STS-7 was a framed Disneyland E ticket, like the one she’d memorialized during her launch. But on the credenza was the children’s book about the solar system that she wrote with Tam; on the wall, a framed membership card for the first Sally Ride Science Club. “There were just so many times where we’d be dealing with kids,” Maria Zuber tells me, laughing, “and she’d look at me and say, ‘They totally get it!’ And they did.”

  MOONKAM

  That enthusiasm is also what inspired Zuber when she invited Sally to brainstorm on a new project she was proposing to NASA: a robotic mission to the Moon, with twin satellites to study lunar gravity. There was room, she said, for something else, “something amazing, off the charts, creative.” Sally immediately thought of EarthKAM—for the Moon. “She said, ‘How about putting a camera on the spacecraft?’ Her company would put together classroom exercises that students
could use in the classroom to study images to learn about the Moon.” They actually proposed two cameras—with four camera heads for different viewing angles on each satellite—and put together a slick video with the irresistible faces of children contemplating the Moon. NASA, famously tough on pitches, with a rigorous review process, bought it—wowed by the children and by the presence of the first American woman in space. “Everybody treated the cameras like they were just as important as everything else,” Zuber says. “Because people on the team, they all have kids!” At the end of the day, “half the board got up and went to meet Sally.” And agreed to give Zuber and Sally $1 million to fund it.

  MoonKAM launched on the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission in March 2012, the two spacecraft smartly named Ebb and Flow by fourth-graders in Montana. That’s what fires the imagination of the fifth graders I meet in New Jersey, whose teacher, Marilyn Ortiz, had given up teaching high school when she realized that these elementary school kids didn’t have basic skills in science. Their enthusiasm over the lunar images was shared by students from all fifty states, who swapped the pictures like baseball cards over the course of nine months; they talked about craters and lunar seas as they walked down the halls; and when they got home, they bragged about what they’d done. Julie Miller, a science teacher-coach in Olathe, Kansas, says parents would ask her, “What is this technology that let my kid bring home a picture of the Moon that she says she took?”

  • • •

  For SRS board member Jane Swift, the fact that Sally built a company and a set of projects throbbing with such sentiment is a key to understanding her. “When you did one-on-one interactions with Sally, her passion didn’t emanate from her persona,” she tells me. “But when you went to the things she created, it was very intense and wonderful and celebratory—all the words you might not use to describe Sally herself.”

  The company was her new excitement, the goal she was seeking after the bank shot of her famous flight. It allowed her, finally, to combine her most deeply held principles: equity for girls and women, the elegance of science and the magic of space. “Stimulate a creative mind, and then anything is possible,” Sally said. She called it “a business imperative, a global imperative.” A high school friend thought Sally saw it as “a moral imperative, striving for something higher, to bring the next generation along.”

  For Sally, her own role was inescapable. “There have been many women in space, but I’m the one that people remember,” she told a reporter in 2010. “That gives me a major responsibility to talk to girls, to young women—to help them appreciate that these are careers that are wide open for women.”

  The goal so enticed her, Sally shed much of her native reserve to promote it. Toni DiMartino-Stebich had first worked with her as the public relations manager at Space.com, constantly begging Sally to do interviews. “As the first American woman in space, Sally was ‘the get,’ but she didn’t exactly want to be gotten,” she tells me. At SRS, however, where DiMartino-Stebich also did PR, “for the first couple of years, Sally granted almost every interview request. It was wonderful! It wasn’t that she changed overnight, but she was happy to put herself out there for something she believed in so strongly.” She noticed “the care Sally took with the girls during the Q&A portion of her speeches … how she lit up during the festivals where she spoke with every girl, took pictures and gave autographs. I remember a few reporters challenging me when they learned that Sally did not have children of her own. Some couldn’t understand her mission even when I replied that Sally was an educator above all.”

  Space author Francis French, another member of the SRS team, also saw the “transforming experiences” of the Sally Ride Science Festivals. “It was thousands of girls just having fun. If, a second before, they saw science as a boring, lonely occupation, now they said, ‘Wow, this is not what I thought it was!’ And I saw that moment so many times.” He also observed Sally’s ability to turn on the charm when it was needed—whether at a festival or an event for Deloitte or somewhere else—but notes, “it was not something she would do naturally. I saw it afterwards. She’d finish and she’d just be tired, and she’d say, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ And we’d go around the back so we didn’t run into anyone else. She found it exhausting.” At one videoconference, French recalls, Sally started doodling, “big, underlined, bold letters, DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS. They were notes to herself that I was supposed to see.”

  Sally’s tolerance for public exposure only went so far; with her own company she could finally control it. “It’s not so much that I don’t like the attention,” she told a reporter on the twentieth anniversary of STS-7 in 2003. “It’s that I want to have a life. I’m the sort of person who likes to be able to just walk into the supermarket and not be recognized. I can do that most of the time now!”

  In 2007, Sally retired from teaching at UCSD to spend all her time with her company. “Science education is my passion,” she told an interviewer. “It’s going to be that for the foreseeable future.”

  11

  *

  DUTY CALLS

  FEBRUARY 2003–FALL 2010

  Columbia Accident Investigation Board, 2003.

  Reporter: Now that you’re focusing on education, what will your role be with NASA?

  Sally Ride: [Space] has been my life for the last twenty years in one way or another … It’s who I am. Don’t expect me to try to divorce myself from the space program, because it’s not going to happen, and I don’t want it to happen.

  COLUMBIA: ANOTHER HORRIBLE DAY

  On the morning of February 1, 2003, Sally was in Orlando for one of her science festivals at the University of Central Florida, less than an hour’s drive from the pad where she’d first flown to fame twenty years earlier. And where the space shuttle Columbia was due to land a little after 9:00 a.m. Sally was sleeping in, still on California time, when she got a phone call from Bear, a few rooms away. Ground controllers had lost contact with Columbia as it reentered the atmosphere. There had been no communication with the crew for more than ten minutes. “Oh, that’s not good,” Sally said, and clicked on the TV.

  She knew where the astronauts should have been, strapped into their seats, helmet visors down, screaming through the atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour and watching out the windows as the orbiter collided with the molecules, turning everything an eerie, glowing pink and orange. It had been compared to flying through a neon tube. But then they should have slowed down, and the crew should have radioed Houston as the spacecraft appeared like a tiny white dot in the clear blue sky to drop safely onto the runway. Instead, Sally watched with the rest of the world as the dreadful news emerged: Columbia had broken apart on its way back to Earth, killing the crew of seven. Five men and two women were gone. Pieces of debris were already turning up in a hideous path from Texas to Louisiana. It was, she thought, “another horrible day.”

  Shock waves like those from the Challenger explosion, almost seventeen years to the day earlier, rippled through Sally’s body. After eighty-seven successful missions, it had happened again. And it had happened, again, while the public, and the families of the astronauts, were watching. As President Kennedy had said on the day Alan Shepard became the first American in space, “Our failures are going to be publicized … and there isn’t anything that we can do or should do about it.” Sally was rocked but faced her own immediate decision: would youngsters still want to celebrate science and space in the wake of the horror? Should they cancel the next day’s Festival?

  “But then, the more we thought about it,” she later said, “and the more we talked to folks, the more we thought that it would be important for the girls, their parents and their teachers, probably as well as for us, to have an opportunity to get together to ask questions, to get some answers to really try to put this into some context and perspective.”

  So Sally rewrote her speech, pulled on a pink turtleneck and jeans, summoned up her Right Stuff smile and answered tough questions from kids w
ith ponytails and braces who sounded wise beyond their tears. “Why wasn’t there a backup plan?” “How do astronauts feel about going up into space now?” “What good has come out of yesterday’s tragedy?” Gradually Sally helped turn the preteen grief session into a rallying cry. “She just affirms for the girls that yes, life carries some risks,” said a teacher who drove her students six hours across Florida from Panama City, “but that you don’t have to be afraid to do something just because of the risks. She helps girls ‘get it.’ ” In return, their resilience strengthened Sally. “We need kids to look to the stars,” she told them, with an unusual catch in her throat. It was, she later said, “not an easy day.”

  Sally also told the girls, in response to a question, that yes, she had helped investigate the Challenger accident, but no, she wouldn’t be doing the same for Columbia.

  One month later, after the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) kicked into gear, the newly appointed chairman, retired Navy Admiral Harold Gehman, recognized the need to add some outside experts to the technicians on board, and to get some continuity with the last catastrophe. He called Sally.

  “She was reluctant to do it,” Gehman tells me. “She was very busy—teaching and her other activities, and could not commit to the seven days a week that she knew the board was working.” Gehman assured her that she didn’t have to move to Houston, and that with her background and the dedicated support staff, she would only have to put in a few days a week. “It took forty-five minutes to convince her,” he recalls, “but with Sally we got a scientist, a veteran of the Challenger investigation, and we got an astronaut. She exceeded our expectations.”