“All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.” – Sally Ride
(1951- ) Former astronaut and first American woman in space. Dr. Sally Ride was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1978 and flew for the first time in 1983. After retiring from the astronaut corp, Dr. Ride joined the University of Califorinia at San Diego as a professor and started her own organization called Sally Ride Science to encourage young girls to enter science, math, technology, and engineering fields.
Sally Ride is Women’s Astronaut Pioneer. Excellent ~
Yes, she is Kathryn! The best part is her endeavors to continue impacting young girls. Check out her site: https://www.sallyridescience.com/. Thanks for reading!
I applaud your bio of Sally Ride, although it would be nice to see more of it. Is that possible?
I would like to bring up that there were also women engineers who helped design the vehicles Sally and others rode into space. In an age when women engineers in this field are still not common, I was hoping there might be some mention of them here on these blogs.
In particular I was trying to look up Barbara Short, an early female design engineer who worked at Ames Research on re-entry vehicles for space exploration at Ames Research in Mountain View for NASA–but I found nothing mentioned about her on the Internet. She worked from the late 1950’s through the early 1980’s. At the time she was on the list of Women’s Who’s Who. According to my partner, she attended Free Flight parties, some of which he attended with her and his ex-wife (Barbara was his ex-wife’s aunt and the original owner of his house).
While cleaning out the garage, we just discovered he still has a very sophisticated looking cone shaped model that Barbara Short designed. He says it was used for re-entry vehicle velocity testing. Apparently it was shot by some kind of high powered cannon to test what might be the best shapes to use for re-entry. We would like to contribute it to a suitable museum, presumably featuring space exploration.
Please write back if you know of any way to find out who to contact.