Obituary of Sally Ride (1951-2012)

The elder child of Carol Joyce (née Anderson) and Dale Burdell Ride, Sally was born in Encino, part of Los Angeles, California. Of Norwegian ancestry, she had one sibling, Karen ‘Bear’ Ride, who is a Presbyterian minister.

She attended Portola Middle School and Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles (now Harvard-Westlake School) on a scholarship. In addition to being interested in science, she was a nationally ranked tennis player. Ride attended Swarthmore College for three semesters, took physics courses at UCLA, and then entered Stanford University as a junior, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English and physics. At Stanford, she earned a master’s degree and a PhD in physics, while doing research in astrophysics and free electron laser physics.

NASA career

Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper seeking applicants for the space program and manage in 1978 to join the astronaut training program. During her career, Ride served as the ground-based Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights (STS-2 and STS-3) and helped develop the Space Shuttle’s robot arm. On June 18, 1983, she became the first US woman in space as a crew member on Space Shuttle Challenger for STS-7. (She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.) On STS-7, during which the five-person crew deployed two communications satellites and conducted pharmaceutical experiments, Ride was the first woman to use the robot arm in space and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.

Her second space flight was in 1984, also on board the Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. Ride, who had completed eight months of training for her third flight when the Space Shuttle Challenger accident occurred,was named to the presidential commission investigating the accident and headed its subcommittee on operations. Following the investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, where she led NASA’s first strategic planning effort, authored a report entitled ‘Leadership and America’s Future in Space', and founded NASA’s Office of Exploration.

After NASA

In 1987, Ride left her position in Washington, DC, to work at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the California Space Institute. During the mid 1990s until her death, Ride led the public outreach efforts of the ISS EarthKAM and GRAIL MoonKAM projects in cooperation with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UCSD, which permitted middle school students to study imagery of the Earth and moon. In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

She was the president and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she founded in 2001 that creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls. Ride wrote or co-wrote five books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.

Personal life

Ride married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982; they divorced in 1987. From 1985 until her death, Ride’s partner was Tam E. O’Shaughnessy, a childhood friend and the chief operating officer and executive vice president of Ride’s company, Sally Ride Science. She co-authored several books with Ride.

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NASA Offers Condolences on the Passing of Pioneering Astronaut Sally Ride