Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Sally Ride. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Sally Ride
Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman in space. She was the third woman in space overall, after USSR cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982). Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32. After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987.
Ride worked for two years at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, the only person to participate in both. Having been married to astronaut Steven Hawley during her spaceflight years and in a private, long-term relationship with former Women's Tennis Association player Tam O'Shaughnessy in her years after, she is the earliest space traveler to have been recognized as LGBT. Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012.
Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.
So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.
I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.
Q: Dr. Ride, apart from the obvious differences, how do you assess the differences in men and women astronauts?
A: Aside from the obvious differences, I don't think there are any.
- Prime crew press conference, April 29, 1982.
There are aspects of being the first woman in space that I'm not going to enjoy.
When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion just waiting to happen.
The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.
I find myself looking around for other new, interesting opportunities to dive into.
The thing I'll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In fact, I'm sure it was the most fun that I'll ever have in my life.
I love the John Glenn model... I may call NASA in 25 years or so, and see if they'd like to send me to Mars.
There are lots of opportunities out there for women to work in these fields, ... Girls just need support, encouragement and mentoring to follow through with the sciences.
So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts -- we wear those a lot -- and NASA T-shirts.
The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.
I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps -- space stamps and Olympics stamps.
I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.
The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.
I have a lot of common sense. I know what needs to be done and how to approach it. I have an ability to work with people on large enterprises.
I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.
I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class -- my class had 29 men and 6 women -- those men were all very used to working with women.
I felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and I felt it was very, very important that I do a good job.
Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same -- it's not even close to the same.
I think it's important for little girls growing up, and young women, to have one in every walk of life. So from that point of view, I'm proud to be a role model!
Studying whether there's life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there's something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That's something that is almost part of being human, and I'm certain that will continue.
We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.
I've spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don't see why I should start now.
But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.