Sally Ride (1983): First American Woman in Space on STS-7

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space when she flew aboard Space Shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission from 18 to 24 June 1983. A physicist chosen in NASA’s first astronaut class to include women, she operated the shuttle’s robotic arm in orbit. Her flight came twenty years after the Soviet Union sent the first woman into space and made her one of the best-known Americans of the decade.

Background: NASA opens the astronaut corps

For its first two decades of human spaceflight, NASA chose its astronauts almost entirely from military test pilots, all of them men. The Soviet Union had already flown Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, but no American woman had followed.

The Space Shuttle changed the requirements. A reusable spacecraft carrying satellites and laboratories needed scientists and engineers as well as pilots, and NASA invited applications for “mission specialists” in 1976. Sally Kristen Ride, born in Los Angeles on 26 May 1951, was then finishing a doctorate in physics at Stanford University. She answered an advertisement in the student newspaper.

In January 1978 NASA announced Astronaut Group 8: 35 candidates, including the first six women, Ride, Judith Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathryn Sullivan, Shannon Lucid and Rhea Seddon. The group also included the first African American and the first Asian American astronauts.

Training and selection for STS-7

Ride trained as a mission specialist and specialised in the shuttle’s Remote Manipulator System, the Canadian-built robotic arm. She served as capsule communicator, the astronaut who talks to the crew from Mission Control, for the second and third shuttle flights in 1981 and 1982.

In April 1982 NASA named her to the crew of STS-7 under commander Robert Crippen, who had flown the first shuttle mission. The announcement drew intense media interest. Reporters asked her questions about emotions, make-up and family plans that were not put to male astronauts, and Ride consistently steered the conversation back to the mission and her work.

The flight of STS-7

Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 7:33 a.m. local time on 18 June 1983. Its crew of five was the largest yet launched on a single spacecraft: Crippen, pilot Frederick Hauck and mission specialists John Fabian, Sally Ride and Norman Thagard, a physician who studied space sickness.

The crew deployed two commercial communications satellites, Canada’s Anik C2 and Indonesia’s Palapa B1. Ride and Fabian then used the robotic arm to release the German-built Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS-01) and capture it again, the first time the arm had deployed and retrieved a free-flying satellite. A camera on SPAS took the first photographs of a shuttle in orbit from outside.

Poor weather in Florida forced the planned first landing at Kennedy to be cancelled. Challenger landed instead at Edwards Air Force Base in California on 24 June 1983, after about six days and two hours in space.

Key people

• Sally Ride (1951-2012): physicist and mission specialist, aged 32 at the time of the flight.
• Robert Crippen: commander, a veteran of STS-1.
• Frederick Hauck: pilot on his first spaceflight.
• John Fabian: mission specialist who shared the robotic arm work with Ride.
• Norman Thagard: physician and mission specialist; in 1995 he became the first American to fly aboard the Russian space station Mir.

Second flight and the Challenger inquiry

Ride flew again on STS-41-G in October 1984, the first mission to carry two women. Her crewmate Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space. Ride was training for a third flight when Challenger broke apart on 28 January 1986.

President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger disaster. She chaired its subcommittee on operations. Years later, Air Force general and fellow commissioner Donald Kutyna said Ride had quietly passed him NASA data on how the solid rocket booster O-rings behaved in cold weather, which helped steer the inquiry to the cause of the accident.

In 1987 she led a NASA study, known as the Ride Report, on long-term goals for the agency. It recommended programmes including Earth observation from space and a return to the Moon.

Later life and legacy

Ride left NASA in 1987. She worked at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control and from 1989 was a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. In 2001 she co-founded Sally Ride Science, a company encouraging girls and young people into science and engineering.

In 2003 she joined the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, making her the only person to serve on the inquiries into both shuttle losses. She died of pancreatic cancer on 23 July 2012. Her obituary disclosed her 27-year partnership with Tam O’Shaughnessy, making her the first known LGBT astronaut. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, and in 2022 she appeared on a United States quarter-dollar coin.

Myths and facts

A common misconception is that Ride was the first woman in space. She was the third, after Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya, who flew in 1982. Her significance lies in opening the American astronaut corps, which until 1978 had admitted no women.

Timeline

• 1951, 26 May: Sally Ride is born in Los Angeles.
• 1978, January: NASA selects her among 35 astronaut candidates, including the first six women.
• 1982, April: She is assigned to the crew of STS-7.
• 1983, 18 June: Challenger launches on STS-7 from Kennedy Space Center.
• 1983, 24 June: Challenger lands at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
• 1984, October: Ride flies her second mission, STS-41-G.
• 1986: She serves on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster.
• 2003: She joins the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
• 2012, 23 July: Ride dies in La Jolla, California, aged 61.

Why it matters

Sally Ride’s flight marked the moment the United States began to treat space as a workplace for women as well as men. Her later work on accident inquiries and science education shaped NASA’s safety culture and inspired a generation of students.