46 Fun Facts About Sally Ride

Which cosmonaut became the first woman in space, twenty years before Ride?

Valentina Tereshkova. The former textile worker orbited for three days in 1963, but Moscow then waited 19 years to fly a second woman, by which time NASA had Ride in training.

Which Space Shuttle carried Ride on her first flight?

Challenger. Ride flew both her missions aboard it and was training for a third when it broke apart after launch in 1986, a loss she was then asked to help investigate.

How did Ride sum up her first flight to reporters after landing?

The most fun I'll ever have. What followed was less fun: months of interviews and appearances that she called incessant, until a second flight assignment put her safely back in training.

Ride, 32, was the youngest American in orbit until 2021, when a 29-year-old flew with which company?

SpaceX. Hayley Arceneaux was given her seat because the flight was raising money for St Jude, the children's hospital that treated her bone cancer at ten and later hired her as a physician assistant.

Ride's first mission carried an experiment on which ailment?

Space sickness. The nausea hits many astronauts in their first days of weightlessness, so crewmate Norman Thagard, a doctor, ran tests on it in orbit.

Before her first flight, reporters asked Ride whether she did what when things went wrong at work?

Cry. Ride sat politely through that and a question about whether the flight would harm her reproductive organs, then said it was too bad her trip was such a big deal.

Which tennis champion encouraged the young Ride to turn professional?

Billie Jean King. Ride decided against the tour and chose physics instead, though she later named King as one of her role models.

Assuming a woman astronaut would want one, what did NASA engineers design for Ride's first flight?

A makeup kit. Ride called advising on it about the last thing she wanted to spend training time on, and later joked about a makeup kit brought to you by NASA engineers.

Alongside physics, Ride earned a Stanford bachelor's degree in which subject?

English literature. Ride earned the arts degree side by side with her physics one and went on writing: after her flights she turned out a string of science books for children.

Which member of Ride's astronaut class became the first African American in space ten weeks after her flight?

Guion Bluford. He flew on the very next Shuttle mission, which lifted off in darkness, a timing forced by the Indian satellite it carried, and came home at night too.

How did Ride first learn NASA was recruiting women astronauts?

A Stanford Daily article. It said NASA wanted scientists and, for the first time, women, so Ride dashed off a handwritten note asking for the forms, and went on to beat some 8,000 other applicants.

Which classmate of Ride's became the second American woman in space?

Judith Resnik. The electrical engineer flew on a new orbiter's maiden voyage in 1984, with Ride's husband among her crewmates, and died in the 1986 launch disaster that Ride helped to investigate.

What did 'TFNG', the nickname of Ride's 1978 astronaut class, officially stand for?

Thirty-Five New Guys. NASA had hired no astronauts for nearly a decade, so the 35 recruits of 1978, six women among them, arrived to find they outnumbered the veterans they were joining.

Which toy maker's 2017 'Women of NASA' set put a Ride figure beside Mae Jemison and Margaret Hamilton?

Lego. The set began as a science writer's proposal on the company's fan site, where other users voted it into production, and it added the astronomer Nancy Grace Roman as a fourth figure.

Ride so enjoyed training flights in NASA's T-38 jets that she went on to earn what?

A private pilot's licence. Ride had never even sat in a light plane before joining NASA, where scientists like her only rode in the back seat of the jets, so she took lessons in her own time.

Which fellow astronaut did Ride marry in 1982?

Steven Hawley. They divorced in 1987, and after her death he remembered her as a very private person who found herself a very public persona, a role she was never fully comfortable in.

Ride was the first woman to hold which Mission Control role, on the second and third Shuttle flights?

CapCom. The capsule communicator is the one voice that speaks to a crew in orbit, and on the second Shuttle flight Ride arranged their wake-up call: a Muppets sketch called 'Pigs in Space'.

Which piece of Shuttle hardware did Ride help develop and operate in orbit?

The robot arm. Ride spent two years helping to test it and write its procedures, then used it on her first flight for the Shuttle's first release and recapture of a satellite.

Which pilot of the first Shuttle flight commanded Ride's crew?

Robert Crippen. He had a say in choosing Ride for his crew, made her his flight engineer, and asked for her again in the same seat on her second mission.

T-shirts at Ride's first launch read 'Ride, Sally Ride', a line borrowed from which song?

'Mustang Sally'. Its writer first called it 'Mustang Mama' until Aretha Franklin suggested the change, and Wilson Pickett's hit version gave the launch-day crowd its slogan.

How many tampons did NASA engineers infamously suggest packing for Ride's six-day flight?

100. When the engineers asked whether that was the right number for a week in orbit, Ride told them it was not, and that they could cut it in half with no problem at all.

Ride's second mission in 1984 carried the first astronaut from which country?

Canada. Marc Garneau flew as a guest researcher on what was then the largest crew ever launched, seven people, and later returned to orbit twice as a fully trained astronaut.

A satellite released and recaptured by Ride's first crew carried a camera that took the first photograph of what?

A Space Shuttle in orbit. The camera was almost an afterthought, Ride recalled, yet the crew spent far longer than planned composing the shot, much to mission control's surprise.

Where did Ride's first flight land after bad weather ruled out Kennedy Space Center?

Edwards Air Force Base. It should have been the first Shuttle landing back at the launch site, so the red carpet and the crew's families were waiting in Florida as they touched down in California.

Which sweets did the White House send into orbit with Ride's first crew?

Jelly beans. President Reagan had taken to them years earlier as a substitute for smoking, and Ride's crew were surprised to find a supply tucked among their food in orbit.

In 2019 which doll brand honoured Ride in its Inspiring Women series, alongside Rosa Parks?

Barbie. Ride was known for guarding her privacy, but seven years after her death Mattel put a doll in her likeness on sale.

On Ride's second flight, which crewmate became the first American woman to walk in space?

Kathryn Sullivan. She stepped outside with David Leestma to rehearse refuelling a satellite in orbit, on the first flight ever to carry two women at once.

Which film festival premiered Sally, the 2025 documentary about Ride and the partner she kept hidden?

Sundance. Ride never let a film be made of her life, so the National Geographic documentary came more than a decade after her death, told largely by her partner of 27 years.

Which presidential panel into the 1986 Shuttle loss did Ride sit on?

The Rogers Commission. Ride was its only serving astronaut, and she never flew again: the fleet stayed grounded so long that she left NASA first.

To whom was Ride's tip about cold-stiffened O-rings passed to protect her as a source?

Richard Feynman. General Donald Kutyna dropped the hint over a car carburettor at his house, and days later Feynman dunked a piece of O-ring in iced water at a televised hearing.

What did Ride publicly give shunned whistleblower Roger Boisjoly after he testified?

A hug. Ride was known as reserved, and she was the only member of the inquiry to offer him support; he said the gesture helped sustain him through a troubled time.

Ride also sat on the 2003 board that investigated the loss of which Space Shuttle?

Columbia. That made Ride the only person to serve on both Shuttle accident inquiries, and she said afterwards that NASA had forgotten some of the lessons of the first.

Ride's 1987 report on NASA's future urged an outpost where, rather than a race to Mars?

On the Moon. Ride's team argued against racing to Mars and for getting there step by step, saying a lunar outpost would combine adventure, science, technology and perhaps the seeds of enterprise.

Ride's 1986 children's book, co-written with Sue Okie, was called what?

To Space and Back. Ride wrote it with Susan Okie, a friend since their scholarship days at a Los Angeles girls' school, who had profiled her for The Washington Post in the year of her first flight.

After leaving NASA, Ride became a physics professor at which university in 1989?

UC San Diego. Ride said the post let her pursue physics and the space programme together, because it came with the directorship of the university's California Space Institute.

Which news website did Ride serve as president of in 1999–2000?

Space.com. Ride ran the young news site, then left in 2000 and started a company of her own with the stated aim of making science and engineering cool again.

Sally Ride Science, her company, focused on science programmes for which audience?

Elementary and middle schoolers. Ride believed peer pressure at around that age was what began driving girls away from science, so that was where she aimed her festivals, camps and clubs.

Ride's EarthKAM project let school students aim a camera aboard which spacecraft from their classrooms?

The International Space Station. The camera first rode on Space Shuttle flights in the 1990s, and its move to the station gave pupils a permanent eye on Earth instead of one that came and went with each mission.

Ride died in 2012 of which illness?

Pancreatic cancer. Ride told almost no one during 17 months of treatment, and at her request NASA kept the illness secret too; she died at home in California aged 61.

How did the public first learn that Ride had spent 27 years with a female partner?

Her obituary. Ride helped to word the announcement before she died, and its one line about a partner of 27 years made her the first astronaut known to have been gay.

Who accepted Ride's posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in 2013?

Tam O'Shaughnessy. The citation read out at the ceremony named her as Ride's life partner, a relationship the two had kept from the public for 27 years.

The RV Sally Ride, christened in 2014, was delivered to which Californian research body in 2016?

Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Navy-owned vessel was the first in the national research fleet named for a woman scientist, and Ride's partner cracked the bottle on its hull.

In 2022 Ride became one of the first women honoured in a new US Mint series on which coin?

The quarter. Her coin shows her beside a Shuttle window, a design drawn from her remark that when she wasn't working in orbit she was usually at a window looking down at Earth.

In 2012 NASA gave Ride's name to which lunar landmark, linked to a mission whose outreach she led?

A probe crash site. NASA deliberately flew its twin gravity-mapping craft, Ebb and Flow, into the surface when their work was done; each had carried cameras that Ride's project let students aim.

Which 1989 Billy Joel hit name-checks Sally Ride?

We Didn't Start the Fire. Ride guarded her privacy and refused to write a memoir, yet six years after her first flight she was a headline in Joel's number-one list of world events since 1949.

Which space drama cast Ellen Wroe as Sally Ride?

For All Mankind. In its rewritten timeline NASA sends a woman up with Apollo in the early 1970s, so Ride is no longer the first, and she crews a nuclear-powered shuttle on a lunar mission.