SALLYRIDE

RIDE, Sally Kristen

RIDE, Sally Kristen (1951- ), American astronaut, who in 1983 became the first woman in the American space program to take part in an orbital mission. Ride obtained a B.S. in physics and a B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973 and earned a Ph.D. in physics there in 1978. That same year she was accepted into the astronaut training program for the space shuttle and was one of the first six women to graduate from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space program. Her first flight into space was made on June 18–24, 1983, aboard the shuttle Challenger. As a mission specialist she took part in launching two communications satellites, and in launching and retrieving a test satellite. Ride later took part in the 13th shuttle mission, on Oct. 5-13, 1984. She was not the first woman in space, however; that honor went to the Russian cosmonaut Valentina V. Tereshkova in 1963.

Ride resigned from NASA in May 1987. In 1989 she became director of the California Space Institute at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego. She is coauthor of To Space and Back (1986).