With so much going sideways since… forever, it can be hard to recall that some great stuff has happened. This week marked 43 years since Sally Ride strapped her ass to a rocket for NASA's seventh space shuttle mission, STS-7. As mission specialist and flight engineer on Space Shuttle Challenger, she became the first American woman in space on June 18, 1983. 43 years later, she still has the most badass astronaut name of anyone to take to the stars.
Ride came to NASA with a Stanford doctorate in physics. In 1978 the agency selected 35 new astronauts; only six were women — a bullshit gender balance if there ever was one — but Ride was tough enough to go toe-to-toe with any high-flying nerd and come out on top. She completed training in 1979, snagged a pilot's license and BOOM: ready for spaceflight. I can't imagine what it's like to be the first anything in space, let alone the first woman in a profession that had been an elite sausage fest for so long.
STS-7 lasted six days but wasn't her last trip up. In 1984 Ride rode (sorry) on the Challenger again for STS-41G: the first mission with two women aboard, and the first to include a female spacewalk, by Kathryn Sullivan. When the shuttle exploded during launch in 1986, Ride assisted the accident investigation. She eventually left for academia, then took a leading role at Space.com. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama asked her to run NASA. She was smart enough to say no.
Ride also became the first known LGBTQ+ person to reach the stars — something that couldn't have been celebrated during her career, since NASA was still toying with the idea that homosexuality was a "psychiatrically disqualifying condition" as late as the 1990s. She died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
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