Today in History 05/26/18

Sally Ride communicates with ground controllers from the flight deck during a Challenger mission in 1983. (© Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)(1951) Trailblazing astronaut Sally Ride is born
Sally Kristen Ride is born in Los Angeles, where she’ll become a nationally ranked tennis player by her junior year of high school. Her focus, however, will shift to science and astronomy. She will join NASA in 1978 and in 1983, she will become the first American woman in space.
Sally Kristen Ride was an American physicist and astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American woman in space in 1983. Ride was the third woman in space overall, after USSR cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya. Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32. After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987. She worked for two years at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, the only person to participate in both. Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012.
Lived: May 26, 1951 – Jul 23, 2012 (age 61)
Height: 5′ 5″ (1.65 m)
Partner: Tam O’Shaughnessy (1985 – 2012)
Spouse: Steven Hawley (m. 1982 – 1987)
Space agency: NASA
Education: Stanford University · Swarthmore College · Harvard-Westlake School · Gaspar De Portola Middle School
Highlights
  • 1982: In 1982, she married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley.

  • 1983: On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on space shuttle Challenger for STS-7.

  • 1987: In 1987, Ride left her position in Washington, D.C., to work at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control.

  • 1989: In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the California Space Institute.

  • 2012: After Sally Ride’s death in 2012, General Donald Kutyna revealed that she had discreetly provided him with key information about O-rings (namely, that they become stiff at low temperatures) that eventually led to identification of the cause of the explosion.

  • 2012: Ride died on July 23, 2012, at the age of 61, in her home in La Jolla, California, seventeen months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Ride on the Middeck
Ride on Challenger’s mid-deck during STS-7 in 1983
wiki/Sally_Ride
4.10.m18

(1951) Trailblazing astronaut Sally Ride is born.
Also on this day,
1647 | American “witch” hanged
1897 | “Dracula” published
1975 | Knievel’s UK jump

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