Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight was a physicist,  the first female American astronaut in space, the youngest astronaut sent into space and a National hero. Today's Out Spotlight is Dr. Sally Ride.

Born in Los Angeles on May 26, 1951, the eldest child of Dale Burdell Ride and Carol Joyce. She had one sibling, Karen "Bear" Ride, who is a Presbyterian minister. Both of parents served as elders in the Presbyterian Church. Her mother had worked as a volunteer counselor at a women's correctional facility and her father had been a political science professor at Santa Monica College.

Ride attended Portola Junior High (now Portola Middle School) and then Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles (now Harvard-Westlake School) on a tennis scholarship. She excelled in science, while a nationally ranked tennis player. She attended Swarthmore College for three semesters, took physics courses at UCLA, and then entered Stanford University as a junior, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English and physics.

She continued to play tennis in college, and caught the attention of Billie Jean King, who encouraged Ride to play professionally. She decided to finish her education.

At Stanford, she went on to earn a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics while doing research on the interaction of X-rays with the interstellar medium. She responded to a NASA recruiting ad and was one of 35 people—including six women— chosen from more than 8,000 applicants to join NASA in 1978. During her career, Ride served as the ground-based capsule communicator (CapCom) for the second and third space shuttle flights (STS-2 and STS-3) and helped develop the space shuttle's robot arm.

Ride was selected as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger. On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on space shuttle Challenger for STS-7. The five-person crew of the STS-7 mission deployed two communications satellites and conducted pharmaceutical experiments. Ride was the first woman to use the robot arm in space and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.

Her second space flight was in 1984, also on board the Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. Ride, who had completed eight months of training for her third flight (STS-61-M, a TDRS deployment mission) when the space shuttle Challenger disaster occurred, was named to the Rogers Commission (the presidential commission investigating the accident) and headed its subcommittee on operations. Following the investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she led NASA's first strategic planning effort, authored a report entitled "NASA Leadership and America's Future in Space" and founded NASA's Office of Exploration.

She later became the only person to serve on the presidential commissions investigating both of the nation’s space shuttle tragedies—the Challenger explosion (1986) and the Columbia disaster (2003).

In 1987, she retired from NASA and became a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford. In 1989, she joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute. In 2001, she founded Sally Ride Science, which motivates girls and boys to study science and explore careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Ride received numerous awards, including the National Space Society's von Braun Award, the Lindbergh Eagle, and the NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Award. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame and was awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal twice. Two elementary schools in the United States are named after her: Sally K. Ride Elementary School in The Woodlands, Texas, and Sally K. Ride Elementary School in Germantown, Maryland.

In 1994, Ride received the Samuel S. Beard Award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

On December 6, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Ride into the California Hall of Fame at the California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.

Ride was extremely private about her personal life. She married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982; they divorced in 1987.

She passed away July 23, 2012 seventeen months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

It was after her death, her obituary revealed that Ride's partner of 27 years was Tam O'Shaughnessy, a professor emerita of school psychology at San Diego State University and childhood friend, who met Ride when both were aspiring tennis players. O'Shaughnessy became a science teacher and writer and, later, the co-founder, chief operating officer, and executive vice president of Ride's company, Sally Ride Science. O'Shaughnessy now serves as Chair of the Board of Sally Ride Science. They co-authored six books about climate change and space together. Their relationship was revealed by the company and confirmed by Ride's sister, who said that Ride chose to keep her personal life private, including her sickness and treatments. Ride is the first known lesbian astronaut.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Ride a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“Young girls need to see role models. You can’t be what you can’t see.”