Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space

Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space

This article relates to Atmosphere

Joan Goodwin, the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Atmosphere, applies to NASA to be one of America's first female astronauts and is accepted to the program as part of Group 9. Group 8 (both in the book and in reality) included Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel into space.

Sally Kristen Ride was born in 1951 in Encino, California. She graduated from Stanford University in 1973 with bachelor's degrees in both physics and English literature, and later earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in physics.

Ride's life changed in 1977, when she learned through an ad that NASA was recruiting women for their astronaut program. She applied and become one of only six women selected to join the class of trainees—the first to include women and people of color. In 1979 she became the first woman to serve as CAPCOM, the person responsible for relaying instructions to the space shuttle. Four years later, she was named a mission specialist for the program's seventh mission (STS-7) as part of the five-person crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Although she was a highly skilled physicist, the press focused on the fact that Ride was a woman, and at pre-launch press conferences she was asked questions like what makeup she was taking aboard the flight, if she cried under stress, or if she was worried about the endeavor's impact on her fertility. The pressure to perform flawlessly was intense. As one character in Atmosphere put it, "If anything goes wrong…If Sally so much as sneezes at the wrong time, everyone will blame it on the fact that she's a woman."

Ride became the first American woman in space, and the youngest American astronaut, on June 18, 1983. Fortunately, every part of the mission went well. During the six-day flight, Ride operated the shuttle's mechanical arm, conducted experiments, and launched two communications satellites. She returned to space a year later, again on the Challenger, becoming the first woman to travel aboard a shuttle twice and part of a crew that (also for the first time) included two women.

After the Challenger, manned by a different crew, exploded during launch on January 28, 1986, Ride was assigned to the presidential commission investigating the accident. Later, she led a strategic planning task force that formulated a strategy for taking humanity to Mars, which was known as the Ride Report. She left NASA in August 1987 and later became a physics professor at UC San Diego, where she served as the director of the California Space Institute. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both asked her to serve as Director of NASA, but she turned down the position both times.

Ride, who was gay, was intensely private about her personal life, and for good reason: only heterosexual relationships were acceptable to NASA at the time that she worked there. (In the early 1990s, NASA even tried to make homosexuality a "psychiatrically disqualifying condition" for astronauts.) Although she married fellow astronaut Steven Hawley in 1982, they divorced five years later, and she had started a romantic relationship with her childhood friend Tam O'Shaughnessy even before the couple separated. Ride and O'Shaughnessy remained partners for the rest of Ride's life, although their relationship wasn't made public until Ride's death from pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Ride was presented with many honors and awards during her lifetime and posthumously, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2013 (which was accepted on her behalf by O'Shaughnessy). She was placed on a first-class postage stamp in 2018, and her likeness was also put on a quarter in 2022 as part of the American Women series. She's even been made into a Barbie doll. Her story is told in the National Geographic documentary Sally, winner of the 2025 Alfred P. Sloan award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The first class of female astronauts at NASA, chosen in 1978, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to Atmosphere. It first ran in the July 2, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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