Sally Ride Interview (page: 5 / 6) First American Woman in Space	Print Interview

You must have been asked this a thousand times, but what is it like up there in space? What were you thinking when you weren't entirely preoccupied with experiments?

Sally Ride: It's absolutely unbelievable, and unfortunately, indescribable.

The view of earth is absolutely spectacular, and the feeling of looking back and seeing your planet as a planet is just an amazing feeling. It's a totally different perspective, and it makes you appreciate, actually, how fragile our existence is. You can look at earth's horizon and see this really, really thin royal blue line right along the horizon, and at first you don't really quite internalize what that is, and then you realize that it's earth's atmosphere, and that that's all there is of it, and it's about as thick as the fuzz on a tennis ball, and it's everything that separates us from the vacuum of space. If we didn't have that atmosphere, we wouldn't be here, and if we do anything to destroy that atmosphere, we won't be here. So it really puts the planet in perspective.
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You flew Challenger I and Challenger II. I remember the day that Challenger III exploded. I am sure you do too. What was going through your mind then?

Sally Ride: It was a blow both professionally, as you can imagine, to everyone in the astronaut corps, but also personally.

Four of the astronauts who were killed in the Challenger explosion were part of our group of 35 astronauts, part of that astronaut class. So, these were people that, at that time, I had known for eight years. I'd worked with them every day, I'd gone to dinner at their houses, I knew their families. So they were very, very close, close friends. My then husband had been on the flight before the Challenger accident, and I was scheduled to go about two months after the Challenger accident. So it hit me very personally, just to lose friends and to think about what might have been. Of course, it was a huge blow professionally, because I think that astronauts understand very well what the risks are of flying in space, but we all also have a real trust and faith in NASA, and the process that it goes through to minimize those risks to the extent possible, and as the investigation unfolded, it became very clear that that system had broken down, and that that system that we trusted to track down any flaw or any piece of bad test data really had failed.
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Having had this extraordinary experience, what was life like after space?

Sally Ride: Well, there is life after NASA. One of the things that I realized while I was in the astronaut corps, and after I had been on my second flight, was how much I really did love science and physics. I had known, even when I went into the astronaut corps, that I would leave someday. NASA's model is astronauts leave after about seven years, and then go on with their lives. That is how they model their recruiting efforts. I had planned to go back into physics and to become a physicist, and after five or six years in the astronaut corps, I realized that that was important to me. I had actually planned to leave NASA after my third flight, which I never had an opportunity to take because of the Challenger accident, but I had planned to go back into academia, into physics research and physics teaching. So it was almost as if that phase of my life had come to a conclusion. I was ready to move on at that time.

There's an old joke, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist." But what does it take to be a rocket scientist?

Sally Ride: It takes the same thing that it takes to be a lot of different things. It takes a love of the subject and it takes a willingness to put in the time to learn the subject and to really be able to make a contribution.

It must be harder than that.

Sally Ride: Ah, not really.

You have concentrated on several different things since then, but one of them is to make what you have done seem more accessible to young women.

Sally Ride: Yeah, that's absolutely right.

In the years since my flight, I had the opportunity to talk to lots and lots and lots of groups, including elementary school kids, high school kids, college students, women's groups, and what I realized in doing that was that there were a lot of young girls and young women who were very, very interested in science, just like I was when I was growing up, and that that number, the number of those girls was rather large in elementary school. In fact, it seemed to be that about the same number of girls as boys showed an interest in the space program, in science, but that by the time they got to high school and college, if I would go to talk to a physics class, I would see that the number of women in the class was not that much more than when I was in college. A little bit better, but not that much more, so it was really clear that the pipeline was leaking more girls than boys, all the way from elementary school through college, and I came to appreciate that the reasons are primarily societal.
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The girls in elementary school are as good at math and science as the boys, the test scores show that. There have been surveys. A 1996 survey of fourth graders asked a bunch of questions, including, "Do you like science?" Sixty-eight percent of fourth grade boys said they liked science, 66 percent of fourth grade girls say they like science. So in fourth grade, it's the same number of boys and girls. Then we start losing both boys and girls, but we lose girls disproportionately all the way through, and it starts right around fourth or fifth grade.

I decided that it was worth my time to try to have some impact on that, and try to, first, help change the culture and make the culture realize that the girls are out there, that if we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys, and that we needed to be able to give girls in middle school, high school and college the same opportunities that we give to boys. So I have put in a lot of time creating programs for girls, particularly in middle school, to just keep them engaged and introduce them to role models, show them that whether they want to be a rocket scientist or a geochemist or a microbiologist, that there are women who are now actively involved in those careers and who love what they do. I think it's slowly but surely having an impact.
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