Sally Ride

Ride grew up good enough at tennis to be ranked twentieth in Southern California by age twelve, coached for a stretch by the former world number one Alice Marble, and she went to Westlake School for Girls on a tennis scholarship seriously considering going pro. Two years into Swarthmore College she got homesick, transferred to UCLA, then finished at Stanford with a physics degree and an English literature degree in the same year, 1973. She stayed for a master's and then a doctorate in physics, finishing in 1978 with a dissertation on how X-rays interact with the material between stars. That January, NASA selected her for its eighth astronaut class — the first to include women at all — out of thousands of applicants who had answered a newspaper ad.

Ride's two shuttle flights, in June 1983 and October 1984, are BriefHistory's story to tell in full. What isn't there: she later sat on both of NASA's accident-investigation boards, for Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, the only person to serve on both — and colleagues on the Challenger panel said she was the one who quietly steered investigators toward the failed O-rings. That is where her public record on spaceflight effectively ends. What follows is what happened around it and after it.

In 1982 Ride married a fellow astronaut, Steven Hawley, in Salina, Kansas; in 1985, while still married and at the height of her fame as the country's most photographed scientist, she began a relationship with Tam O'Shaughnessy, a former professional tennis player she'd first known as a teenage rival on the junior circuit. The marriage ended in divorce in 1987. The relationship with O'Shaughnessy did not end for twenty-seven years, until Ride's death, and neither NASA nor the American public knew it existed. She gave interviews about spaceflight and physics for three decades without once discussing her private life, protecting a relationship NASA had never had to publicly reckon with.

The obituary her family released after her death on July 23, 2012, named O'Shaughnessy as her partner of twenty-seven years — the first time the relationship became public, and the reason Ride is now remembered as the first astronaut confirmed to have been LGBTQ. The honors that followed treated both halves of her life as part of the record: a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, a research ship christened in her name in 2014, a postage stamp in 2018, and in 2022 a place on the American Women quarter, the first known LGBTQ person to appear on U.S. currency. Sally Ride Science, the company she built with O'Shaughnessy to get girls into STEM classrooms, is still running.

Sally Ride's life against the full span of the corpus.

• STS-7 mission
  First American woman in space; deployed communications satellites 1983
• STS-41-G mission
  Deployed the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite; first American woman to fly twice 1984
• To Space and Back book
  Children's book about her own shuttle flight 1986
• Sally Ride Science company
  Founded with Tam O'Shaughnessy to build science programs for girls 2001

• May 26, 1951 aged 0 Born in Santa Monica, California
• January 16, 1978 aged 26 Selected for NASA's first astronaut class to include women
• July 26, 1982 aged 31 Marries fellow astronaut Steven Hawley
• June 18, 1983 aged 32 Flies as a mission specialist on Challenger's STS-7
• 1985 aged ~34 Begins a relationship with Tam O'Shaughnessy
• 1986 aged ~35 Serves on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster
• 1987 aged ~36 Divorces Steven Hawley and leaves NASA for Stanford
• 2003 aged ~52 Serves on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board
• July 23, 2012 aged 61 Dies of pancreatic cancer in La Jolla, California

• Richard Feynman 1918–1988
  Theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and his accessible teaching style. served with on the Rogers Commission
• Mae Jemison b. 1956
  First African American woman in space, physician, and advocate for science education and global health. opened the way for
• Billie Jean King b. 1943
  Tennis champion and advocate for gender equality who defeated Bobby Riggs in the famous Battle of the Sexes. fellow trailblazer in a men's domain
• Sandra Day O'Connor 1930–2023
  First woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by President Reagan. broke a barrier in the same era
• Amelia Earhart 1897–1937
  Aviation pioneer and the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. distant predecessor in flight