Sally Ride

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. California Girl

  2. 40–Love, Sally

  3. Wait!

  4. Thirty-five New Guys

  5. First

  6. Reentry

  7. Explosions

  8. New Territory

  9. Down to Earth

  10. Sally Ride Science

  11. Duty Calls

  12. The Secret

  13. A Very Private Thing

  14. Impact

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Sources

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Credits

  For Tyler, Tessa, Riley and Sammy: our future.

  INTRODUCTION

  The man in the spacesuit drifted down the ladder, a ghostly image on the surface of the Moon. A quarter-million miles away, on a steamy, hot night during Earth’s midsummer, an eighteen-year-old college student stared at the TV screen in awe, fighting off the sleep she needed for the next day’s tennis tournament.

  “That’s one small step …” began Neil Armstrong, etching the first human footprint into lunar soil.

  Sally Ride was mesmerized. She could not know that the same forces that had propelled the astronaut to the Moon would one day shape the trajectory of her own life; that she, too, would make cosmic history; and that their paths would eerily converge. That night, it was unimaginable. Anyway, she had a match to play.

  —July 20, 1969

  “Who was Sally Ride?”

  A flurry of little hands shoots skyward, urgently beating the air to get my attention. The long answer is complicated—elusive, to many of her friends—but I’m going for the obvious here, posing the question to a group of fifth graders in New Jersey who are bursting to show off what they’ve learned. Sort of.

  I point to a girl with neat cornrows taming her hair, dressed in the yellow shirt and navy pants that is the school uniform.

  “The first woman to walk on the Moon?”

  “Not quite,” I tell her. “Anyone else?”

  “The first lady to step in space?” This from a slim, studious-looking fellow with a voice deeper than his years.

  “Nope. But close,” I say, thrilled that they’re thinking galaxy. “Next?”

  “A great scientist?”

  Well, yes, but …

  I am about to end the exercise when an insistent youngster with pearly studs punctuating her earlobes lowers her arm, looks at me calmly and announces with confidence, “The first American woman in space.”

  Bingo.

  Never mind that these two dozen preteens were born nearly two decades after she soared into their history books, and that this is their first hands-on science class. Sally Ride is on their radar (or near enough) because she made the unimaginable possible, bringing outer space to their inner-city classroom. Long after her own trip off the planet, she created a program that takes them to the Moon—through their laptops—where they can act like science tourists, ordering custom snapshots of its mysterious, gray terrain by keying in coordinates that will be relayed to cameras on twin satellites orbiting the lunar surface. Tomorrow their carefully chosen images will be delivered: real-time close-ups of craters and mountains as accessible as the Grand Canyon, ready to study, frame and slap onto the refrigerator door. The project is called MoonKAM, a unique opportunity for young Earthlings to expand their futures by clicking into the ancient heavens; a close encounter with the solar system that not only keeps them focused for a solid hour and a half but ignites their dreams and can change their lives.

  Just ask Genesis Santos, the optimistically named twelve-year-old daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and Honduran father. She participated in the program last year and has stopped by to offer the more grownup perspective of a sixth grader. I ask how taking pictures with MoonKAM has affected the way she regards the big yellow ball hanging over her Jersey City neighborhood at nighttime. “Well,” she confides, “I used to think that the Moon just illuminated the sky. Now I see a different view. It makes me want to float in space and walk on the Moon.” By focusing beyond Earth, Genesis discovered herself. She wants to be a scientist.

  Which pretty much sums up the arc and the impact of Sally Ride’s own life.

  Her place in history will forever be secure as the plucky, thirty-two-year-old physicist with the winning grin who rocketed through the celestial glass ceiling to prove that women, too, could have the right stuff. On June 18, 1983, well into the social revolution that enabled women to start taking their equal place throughout the rest of society, she defied the institutional gravity of American spaceflight and zoomed into the national psyche. Sally Ride was not the first woman in orbit—two Russians had gotten there before her—but she was the first American woman in space, with the attendant publicity and allure of the free world. She also remains the youngest American ever launched. Her achievement, and the celebrity that resulted, captivated and inspired several generations of admirers. She was, briefly, the most famous person on the planet.

  • • •

  Being first at anything guarantees headlines, at least temporarily. We honor pioneers; we crave heroes; we count on explorers of every dimension to peek beyond the edges of our neighborhoods, our nations and our understanding to tell us what’s out there. And when “out there” is outer space, news becomes legend. What’s up—as in thumbs or the stock market or our outlook—is good. Brightness and beauty are measured by the sun and the stars, righteousness by heaven. Progress means breaking through ceilings, not floors; astonishment is otherworldly. The mystery of the universe, with its infinite horizons and limited access, and the fiery risk of riding two giant Roman candles to get there, magnified Sally Ride’s entry into what had long been an all-male cowboy culture, into a potent, can-do symbol. Many women, especially young women, translated her bold journey into their own tickets to success. If that door was open, they reasoned, so is everything else.

  But while flying in space defined her public image, and would always anchor her public service, it never circumscribed Sally’s view of herself. Being an astronaut was her adventure, not her vocation. She spent only nine years at NASA. For the next quarter century she mastered a succession of careers that grew out of her earliest convictions and built upon each other. As a teen, she tasted, then rejected a life in professional tennis but assimilated the lessons of teamwork and grace under pressure. As a retired astronaut, she did research on arms control and taught physics to university students, increasingly motivated by the fragility of Earth that she’d seen from space. In Washington, DC, she advised two presidents, testified before committees of Congress, and regularly refused political office, too private to belong to the public. Once the bright new face of NASA, she also became its conscience, repeatedly agreeing to help get the agency back on track or chart its future. And wherever she found herself, she championed programs to advance the status of women and fought against stereotypes that dampened children’s dreams, barriers to success that had never stopped her. There was no master plan, just pieces she kept fitting together as she refined her vision.

  Her trust in science led to her conviction that a scientifically literate nation is our only hope. It all coalesced in the company she founded, Sally Ride Science, whose purpose was to get and keep eight-to twelve-year-olds, especially girls, interested in and committed to math and science. The message, relayed through innovative educa
tional products and programs for both students and teachers, and sometimes partnered with NASA (like the orbiting cameras focused on the Moon) echoed her own fantastic voyage: Science is cool and gender no obstacle to rocketing into space or sequencing the genome of a tropical frog. The grander goal was implicit: with proper encouragement and support, kids can be who, and what, they want. Even the sky is no limit. That was her passion and her focus when she died of cancer in 2012, too young at age sixty-one.

  • • •

  I met Sally Ride in 1981 when, as a correspondent for ABC News, I was asked to join the team covering NASA’s upcoming new space shuttle program. My first assignment, on my first trip to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, was to profile some of the so-called new breed of astronauts—the women and minorities and male civilian scientists ushering in an era of more routine rocketry. Sally was one of the newbies NASA offered up. A self-described astrophysicist who spoke in English, not technotalk, she hooked me in our first interview with her direct manner and her determination. “Why do you want to go into space?” I asked, expecting the cocksure response of the dominant astronaut culture. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ve discovered that half the people would love to go into space, and there’s no need to explain it to them. The other half can’t understand, and I couldn’t explain it to them. If someone doesn’t know why, I can’t explain it.” In a fraternity of uptight crew cuts, she was a breath of fresh feminism, acknowledging unequivocally that the women’s movement had made her selection possible; that NASA, with its twenty-year heritage of white male fighter pilots, was finally doing the right thing. We became friends immediately.

  As the program developed and I wound up anchoring ABC’s space coverage, Sally and I continued to spend time together. We bonded over cold shrimp and funny stories at a variety of local dives, at least one of which promised mud wrestling, which we somehow avoided. We shared a healthy disregard for the overblown egos and conservative intransigence of both our professions. And beneath her unemotional demeanor that some called icy, I found a caring friend with an impish wit. When she married fellow astronaut Steve Hawley, their home became my beer-and-pizza hangout during other folks’ shuttle missions. They were friends as well as stories, and none of us betrayed our bosses. In fact, given NASA’s longstanding distrust of the press—we were the dreaded diggers who could unmask a space hero as a mere mortal—I think we all enjoyed having a pal in the other camp. I knew that Sally avoided most reporters, that she kept her private life more private than most, but in those days before the maw of 24/7 cable chatter devoured every scrap of a celebrity’s existence, the tidbits I picked up seemed irrelevant. Our off-the-grid conversations informed my on-the-air coverage. And Sally got as good as she gave, relishing her entrée into the back story of network news and thanking the editors and producers who helped put her story on the air.

  On the eve of her famous first flight (a time when, to avoid stray germs, astronauts were quarantined from human contact and off-limits to reporters) Sally telephoned me while I was working on that night’s script at the ABC workspace.

  “Hi there!” came a familiar, cheery voice. “In five minutes, why don’t you walk outside your trailer and look down towards the parking lot.”

  I put down the phone and stepped out into the fading Florida sun. There she stood, about twenty-five yards away, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt and waving to me from a car parked off the main drive. I wasn’t allowed to get closer—and she knew I wouldn’t jeopardize the flight—but it was reassuring to see her in such good spirits. I could report exclusively on the air that night that the woman most in demand at the Kennedy Space Center at that moment was doing just fine. And pushing the envelope, as she always did, with a playful, anti-authoritarian attitude—up to a point. Sally liked to break rules she found dumb, which made her great fun as a friend. But she was also a reliable team player, who could line up with her crew crossing the tarmac behind her commander and take orders like a trooper.

  When her flight ended, and her face adorned every major magazine on the newsstand, my husband, Larry, and I became her refuge in New York. She and Steve visited us in the city and at the beach. After she flew again the following year—taking small items aloft for both Larry and me in the strictly limited space of her personal kit—they joined us on a tropical Christmas vacation.

  Sally was fine company, always up for a word game, interested in everything. Her celebrity never got in the way of her humility or her good humor. It’s not that she had no ego—she did, and it was healthy. But it didn’t enter the room before she did, either in private or in public. And it certainly didn’t get in the way of our friendship.

  Then, in January 1986, Challenger exploded, and the scales dropped from all of our eyes. Some of NASA’s managers and contractors—heirs to those who had put a dozen men on the Moon and brought Apollo 13 home safely, who had made the Shuttle the bright new hope—were caught in their own carelessness. Sally joined the Rogers Commission investigating the accident, and I covered it daily, as the grim revelations emerged. For a time she was posted to NASA Headquarters in Washington, helping plot a new direction for the space agency. And then we both moved on. Sally got divorced, retired from NASA, returned to California and academia. I transferred to 20/20, where, despite my best efforts, space was never regarded as a ratings grabber.

  Our friendship endured—long dinners and visits when we found ourselves in the same city; breezy phone conversations, amusing little notes, then emails. Plus her usual apologetic requests when the inevitable documentary or awards dinner required a quote from someone who knew her when. And while she might dine with Prince Charles or take meetings in the Oval Office, I often found Sally flopped on the floor of my living room, shoeless, legs draped over the coffee table, watching TV.

  But over her last few years, I hardly saw her. And while we stayed in touch, I was unaware that beyond the zone of privacy that gave her room to breathe—the zone where I hung out and thought I knew her—a barrier of secrecy had concealed essential pieces of Sally’s self.

  I did not realize the psychic price she had paid for being the first American woman in space. I did not know she had been diagnosed with cancer that would take her life in just seventeen months. And I did not know for sure, as was revealed in the last line of her obituary, that she had been in a loving and committed relationship with a woman for the past twenty-seven years.

  Sally was very good at keeping secrets.

  • • •

  If Sally Ride had written this book, it would be a thin one, lean as its subject (5‘5½”, 110 pounds), with no literary version of body fat. Or excess emotion. In grammatical terms—totally appropriate for the Stanford graduate with a dual major in English and physics—Sally was never an adjective, pausing to embellish; she was a verb, an action verb. Her headline-ready name was a sentence, maybe a command. She did, performed, carried out; after NASA, she used her considerable clout to reset frontiers, pushing gently against anything that might stop her forward momentum. Sally always looked ahead, never back. But even that vision had limits: “I’m not a goal-oriented person,” she told one reporter, articulating an often-repeated sentiment. “I don’t look out into the future and say, ‘Five or ten years from now, this is what I want to be doing, there is where I want to be.’ I’m very much a person who lives in the moment and gets very, very involved in whatever I happen to be doing now.”

  That carpe diem mentality may also explain why she never wanted the story of her own life confined between two covers, insisting even after she owned the made-for-marketing title—First American Woman in Space!—that she hadn’t yet done enough. Later, when by any measure she had, there were just too many things competing for her time.

  And a few she did not want to make known.

  “I’m not ready and may never be ready to write the book that publishers want me to write,” she said in 1986, without amplification. That was after publication of the only book she did write about her blastoff f
rom the planet and into history—a children’s book, because, according to coauthor and childhood friend Susan Okie, she liked kids’ enthusiasm. “They asked the questions that everybody wanted to know the answers to, but that adults were too embarrassed to ask,” Okie recalls. Like, how do you go to the bathroom in space? Sally had no problem with queries like that. Far more irritating were what her father, Dale Ride, called the “monumentally insipid questions” from (mostly) male reporters, epitomized by the breathtakingly flat-footed, “When you get angry, do you weep?” Sally was mindful of her responsibility to the public as the beneficiary of a government program, but there were some things she was just not interested in, or capable of, sharing. It’s not who she was.

  So who was she?

  That’s what this book seeks to describe. I’m writing it because Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner in love and business, decided within days of her death that it was time for a proper biography. That the obituaries, fine as many were, didn’t capture the richness or the nuance of her life. And that the helicopters circling overhead and the reporters ringing the doorbell meant that the collective gasp over her newly revealed sexual orientation needed to be addressed with a full appreciation of the life she shared with Tam. In short, that in the interest of honesty it was time to lift the veil of privacy Sally had guarded so tenaciously. In the process, the family—Tam, along with Sally’s sister, Bear Ride; and her mother, Joyce Ride—would make themselves exclusively available to the author to tell their stories. When Tam laid this all out to her agent, Esther Newberg, and asked about an author, Esther called me. The offer was bittersweet: back when Sally decided to write her first children’s book, she had asked me to recommend an agent and I’d connected her with Esther. Our friendship had come full circle.

  • • •

  So yes, I bring bias to this project, but I have not checked my journalism credentials at the door. Writing Sally’s life without her participation has made me, like any biographer, part detective, part historian, part arbiter of divergent tales, often piecing together fragments very reluctantly divulged. I have also tried to view her story against the backdrop of the times and attitudes that shaped sweeping changes in American behavior. Because I lived through and reported on both the social revolution that enabled her flight and the extraordinary impact of the mission itself, I’ve been able to draw on my own stories, notes and memories. Much of her NASA history, of course, is public, and Sally’s responses to thousands of questions from other reporters, as well as from the legislators who sought her wisdom, not to mention the many articles and opeds she wrote herself, can be as enlightening as they are repetitive. Her voice rings throughout much of this book. But on occasion, she changed her version of events, an annoying trait that confounds the facts and confuses the historical record. Just for instance, she did not grow up wanting to be an astronaut, and except for a few offhand quips, never considered the possibility until she was twenty-six. But in later years—out of boredom? making mischief? because she thought it would be easier to understand?—she sometimes reimagined herself to audiences as a little girl with rocket dreams. That kind of harmless inconsistency was easy enough to correct here.