Sally Ride - The first American woman in space
October 25th, 2008 - 12:11 pm ICT by Amrit Rashmisrisethi
Sally Ride , first interest was tennis and after winning a tennis scholarship to Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, she dropped out of Swarthmore college to continue a professional tennis career where she realized she didn’t have enough capabilities for being a professional tennis player. She then enrolled at Stanford University and received her bachelor’s degrees in English and physics
Sally Kristen Ride became the first American woman and youngest American to enter outer space in 1983 and was was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya.
The former NASA astronaut was among the 8,900 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper seeking applicants for the space program and joined Nasa in 1978. In her career, Ride was the 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. In June 1983, Sally became the first American woman in space as a crew member on Space Shuttle and spent more than 343 hours in space. She was a mission specialist on STS-7, which launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. In 1982, she married a NASA Astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982, and the two divorced in 1987.
Sally Ride received quite a number of awards and honors and inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and the Astronaut Hall of Fame.
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Tags: first American woman in space, nasa astronaut, Sally Ride