![]() ![]() As it prepared for the flight, NASA suggested she take 100 tampons for a week-long mission and even created a makeup kit for her to take to space. The media and NASA itself struggled to figure out what to make of the personable, straightforward scientist. ( Read how Ride helped inspire this astronaut hopeful.) Five years later, after mastering various behind-the-scenes roles at mission control and helping develop the International Space Station’s robotic arm, Ride was chosen as a crew member for STS-7, a June 1983 flight on the Challenger shuttle. Ride and her fellow women astronauts kept their heads down and tried their best not to garner special attention. As Ride read the ad’s list of applicant qualifications, she realized that, in her words, “I’m one of those people.” Indeed, she was one of six women selected for the class of 35 out of an applicant pool of 8,000. That year, during Congressional hearings on the feasibility of sending women to space, astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified against the program, claiming women were not qualified because they were not military test pilots-a longstanding requirement for NASA astronauts-even though that profession, too, was closed to women.īut by the time Ride applied to the agency in 1978, NASA had dropped that requirement. But though the group passed the same set of tests as NASA astronauts, the Woman in Space Program was ditched in 1962. In the early 1960s, 13 women participated in a privately funded program designed to test whether women could succeed in space. Though women had already been to space-Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had paved the way in 1963-NASA had long resisted the idea of women astronauts. NASA was recruiting for its 1978 class, and for the first time, women were invited to apply. Ride was completing her doctorate at Stanford when she saw the newspaper ad that would change her life-and the history of space flight. Though she almost pursued a career in tennis-she was a nationally-ranked player as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College and then Stanford University-the young Ride instead opted for a career in astrophysics. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īorn in Los Angeles in 1951, Ride successfully turned a childhood interest in science, spurred in part by a chemistry set, into a storied STEM career. ![]()
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