June 18, 1983: SALLY RIDE

Following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the transition from the modest manners of the Carter years to the glitz of the Reagan era was swift. The president-elect and his glamorous wife swept into Washington in a swirl of fur and flashbulbs, like a movie premiere, symbolizing the optimism and excesses of the 1980s. Fashions featured Dynasty’s sequined shoulder pads, Wall Street’s suspenders, Madonna’s lingerie and Jane Fonda’s leg warmers. On television, African American talk show host Oprah Winfrey became a first name phenomenon and fictional journalist Murphy Brown represented white working women and single moms. Sandra Day O’Connor rose to the Supreme Court and Sally Ride rocketed into space.

On June 18, 1983, NASA launched the Challenger shuttle mission. On board was Sally Ride, America’s first female astronaut to fly in space. Like O’Connor, being first made Ride a cultural icon. With symbolic significance came intense attention and the responsibility to “represent” their gender, in the same way that winning the “space race” became a metaphor for the United States besting the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and ignited a competition between the superpowers. Under President Eisenhower, Project Mercury selected seven men to participate: Scott Carpenter, Leroy Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil (Gus) Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald (Deke) Slayton. The goal was to orbit a manned spacecraft around the earth.

Manned was the appropriate verb. The first corps of American astronauts had been military test pilots. They came to stand for the masculine mystique of the Kennedy era. After Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, President Kennedy understood that the United States needed to surpass the Soviets, to restore American confidence. National reputations (and male egos) were at stake. In a May 1961 address to the Congress, the new president declared, “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon.”

At that time, thirteen women pilots had taken part in a privately funded program to test them for space flight. It was run by Dr. Randy Lovelace, a NASA scientist, who conducted the official Mercury program physicals. They were called First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATS) and later the Mercury 13. Among them was Jerrie Cobb, who recruited the others. One of them, Jane Briggs Hart, was married to Senator Phil Hart (D-MI). Another, Wally Funk, is still alive. In 2021 she became the oldest person in space, at age eighty-eight. She flew on the sub-orbital Blue Origin New Shepard 4, owned by Jeff Bezos. (Ed Dwight, ninety, flew into space in 2024.)

Jeff Bezos applauding Wally Funk, July 2021.

In 1959, Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb, twenty-eight, was the first and only one of the thirteen to pass the seventy-five qualifying tests and training exercises, including physical and psychological fitness. She ranked in the top 2% of all astronaut candidates, male or female. Dr. Lovelace announced the results at the International Symposium on Submarine and Space Medicine in Stockholm in 1960. Cobb’s success was reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Life magazine. The information was not secret; it was ignored.

Born in 1931, into a military family, she began flying at age twelve in Ponca City, Oklahoma. By sixteen, she was barnstorming. She earned a commercial pilots license before she graduated from high school in 1948. Confronted by sexism and competition from returning veterans, she was hired at an airplane maintenance shop, as a typist. She took jobs patrolling pipelines, dusting crops and delivering fighter jets and bombers to foreign buyers.

To buy her own plane, from World War II surplus, Cobb played semi-professional baseball with the Oklahoma City Queens. She worked for Aero Design and Engineering and used its planes to set the world record for non-stop long-distance flight, the 1959 world light-plane speed record and a 1960 world altitude record for lightweight aircraft. In 1959, Cobb was the first woman to fly in the Paris Air Show, the world’s largest air exposition. Her fellow pilots named her Pilot of the Year and awarded her the Amelia Earhart Gold Medal of Achievement. By 1960, Cobb had logged 7,000 air miles.

NASA’s refusal to accept any women prompted a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics to investigate gender discrimination in 1962, two years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. “We women pilots . . . are not trying to join the battle of the sexes,” Cobb testified. “We [want] a place in our nation’s space future without discrimination.” John Glenn testified the next day. “Men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order,” he declared, ignoring the role of the WASPs (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots) in World War II.

That view prevailed, despite specialists in aerospace medicine, who testified that women would make excellent astronauts. “They generally weighed less than men and were shorter, s they would need less oxygen and less food and water . . . They were more resistant to radiation, less prone to heart attacks and better suited to handling pain, heat, cold and loneliness.” The USSR sent the first female cosmonaut into space in 1963. Valentina Tereshkova completed forty-eight orbits in seventy-one hours. The American press derided her “plump figure” and lack of lipstick.

Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova

In May 1961, Cobb had been named a consultant to NASA Administrator James Webb, to advise him about women in space. After the Congressional hearings, she quit. For the next four decades, she worked as a bush pilot in the Andes and the Amazon, delivering food and medicine to indigenous people. On July 20, 1969, she listened to the moon landing. According to her obituary, “Alone in the Amazon, she danced on the wings of her plane in the moonlight.”

Jerrie Cobb with the Mercury capsule, 1961. Note the white gloves and heels.

In 1981, Cobb was nominated for a Nobel Prize. In 1999, when she was sixty-eight, NOW and others lobbied, unsuccessfully, to send Cobb into space, as John Glenn had been, to test the effect of weightlessness on aging bodies. She died in 2019. They Promised Her the Moon (2017), a play by Laurel Ollstein, tells the story of Cobb’s struggle to become an astronaut.

Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb

After a 1972 amendment to the Civil Rights Act barred discrimination by federal agencies, NASA could no longer exclude women or applicants of color. Over 8,000 people responded to an open call, including 1,251 women; 208 were tested. In 1978, NASA named thirty-five new astronaut candidates, fifteen pilots and twenty mission specialists. Twenty-six white men were the majority. Three were Black men. Six were white women: two physicians, a biochemist, a geophysicist, an engineer and a physicist, Dr. Sally Ride. Having developed the space shuttle, NASA needed more specialists than test pilots.

From the cover of THE SIX (2004).

Ride was chosen to spend six days on the shuttle Challenger in June 1983. At age thirty-two, she was the youngest American in space. Few accommodations were made for gender. Seats were adjusted for shorter legs. (Ride was 5’ 5” tall, the same height as Tereshkova.) NASA added a privacy screen around the toilet, and moisturizer, “hair restraints” and tampons were allowed on board. Male engineers estimated she would need one hundred tampons for the trip.

The daughter of two elders in the Presbyterian Church, a political science professor and a volunteer counselor at a women’s prison, Sally Ride was born in 1951 near Los Angeles. Her younger sister Karen became a Presbyterian minister. Ride attended Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles on scholarship. She felt out of place among the “Bel Aire belles,” but found a mentor in the science department. An exceptional student and talented athlete, she had dreamed of being an astronaut.

Ride attended Swarthmore College for three semesters but missed California. She quit to pursue tennis before transferring to Stanford as a junior, where she played rugby and tennis, becoming her team’s No. 1 singles player. Billie Jean King urged her to compete professionally. Years later, when a girl asked her why she chose science over tennis, Ride replied, “a bad forehand.” She had earned dual degrees in English and physics and a PhD in astrophysics when she saw NASA’s recruitment notice in a newspaper.

She was selected to be the first woman because the crew needed her specific skill set, operating the space arm to retrieve a satellite. Ride emphasized that she was a team member and a scientist, not a female scientist. Nonetheless she endured a barrage of sexist questions: “Would she wear a bra or makeup in space?” “How would she deal with menstruation?” “Did she cry on the job?” to which she responded, “Will you would ask my crew mates that?” Johnny Carson joked on The Tonight Show that the shuttle would be delayed while Ride searched for shoes to match her purse.

The night before Ride’s flight, her classmate Anna Fisher was on overnight duty in the Challenger cockpit, guarding its switches and buttons in advance of the next morning’s launch. Fisher was eight months pregnant. That image challenges those of fictional male heroes commanding cockpits. Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on the Star Trek series, would also undermine that stereotype. She later worked with NASA to recruit minorities for the space program.

Nichelle Nichols playing Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura (1966-1969)

Despite Ride’s modesty and reticence, America was mesmerized. Veteran WASPs were in a crowd estimated at 250,000 to watch the launch at Cape Canaveral (near Cape Kennedy). Many wore “RIDE SALLY RIDE” T-shirts, a riff on Wilson Pickett’s 1966 song, “Mustang Sally.” When she landed, her mother exclaimed, likely apocryphally, “Thank God for Gloria Steinem!” Exiting the cockpit, Ride refused to accept a bouquet. She told reporters, “I’m sure it was the most fun I’ll ever have in my life.”

Ride’s second flight, in October 1984, included her classmate, geophysicist Kathryn Sullivan, who became the first woman to walk in space. Ride’s third flight was cancelled after the January 28, 1986, Challenger explosion. Seventy-three seconds after take-off, it killed another classmate, engineer Judith Resnick, and Christa McAuliffe. She was a New Hampshire junior high school teacher, chosen from 10,463 applicants to be the first private citizen to go into space. After the disaster, NASA halted recruitment and suspended flights for three years.

Ride retired. As a member of the panel President Reagan appointed to investigate the Challenger accident, she grilled witnesses. She was impaneled again in 2003 to investigate the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia over Texas. In 1987 she led a team studying the future of NASA. It recommended an outpost on the moon and the ultimate goal of getting to Mars.

Ride also served in academic and defense industry advisory roles, taught at the University of California-San Diego and wrote six children’s books. In one she explained how to make a sandwich in space. Her passion was inspiring girls to pursue science. She wanted to make “science and engineering cool again.”

Notably reserved, Ride guarded her private life. She married and divorced fellow astronaut Stephen Hawley. They had no children. Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, at sixty-one. Her company, Sally Ride Science, identified its CEO, Tam O’Shaughnessy, as a survivor and her partner of twenty-seven years. It was the first public acknowledgment that Ride was a lesbian. Editors at the New York Times debated whether to “out” Ride in her obituary, setting off a debate about posthumous privacy. O’Shaughnessy is featured in “SALLY,” the National Geographic documentary that premiered this week on Disney and Apple +.

O’Shaughnessy & Ride, Sydney, Australia, 2004, screen shot from Natl. Geo. documentary

Mae Jemison was the first of six Black female astronauts to date. Born in 1956, she entered Stanford at sixteen and earned dual degrees in chemical engineering and African American studies. After graduating from Cornell medical school, she worked as a general practitioner and volunteered for the Peace Corps. Inspired by Ride, Jemison applied to NASA. On the Endeavor crew, she conducted forty-three experiments during 126 earth orbits. She subsequently taught at Dartmouth, founded a technology company and established an international space camp for high school students.

Ellen Ochoa was the first Hispanic astronaut and the second woman to lead NASA. As of April 2025, 105 women had completed space fights. Today there are nineteen female and twenty-seven male active American astronauts. Women are 41%; globally women at 11%. Women have piloted shuttles, commanded missions and undertaken spacewalks. In October 2019, Cynthia Koch and Jessie Meir made history on the first spacewalk conducted by women only.

Dr. Mae Jemison & Dr. Ellen Ochoa

With the current administration’s dismissal of DEI and erasure of history, it’s important to acknowledge that our culture has its own history of ignoring and diminishing “others.” Ten days from now, June 28, will be the tenth anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The landmark Supreme Court case held, 5-4, that state bans on same sex marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. On June 28, 1969, just after midnight, the Stonewall riots broke out in New York City, when a NYPD vice squad raided a gay bar. It’s time to take every element of American history out of the closet.

SOURCES:

Photo credits, as noted or public domain.

Katharine Q. Seelye, “Geraldyn M. Cobb, 88, Who Found a Glass ceiling in Space, Dies,” New York Times (April 19, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/obituaries/geraldyn-m-cobb-dead.html

Margaret A. Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Taylor Telford, “She Waited 60 Years To Take This Flight,” Washington Post (July 2, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/01/wally-funk-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space/

Denise Grady, “Sally Ride, Trailblazing Astronaut, Dies at 61,” New York Times (June 21, 2012), https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/science/space/sally-ride-trailblazing-astronaut-dies-at-61.html

Denise Grady, “A Deadline Call on Posthumous Privacy,” New York Times (July 23, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/insider/sally-ride-obituary-posthumous-privacy.html

Jeanette Catsoulis, “’Sally’ Review: Rocket Woman,” New York Times (June 17, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/movies/sally-review-rocket-woman.html?unlocked_article_code=1.P08.ROyP.twEtAoPSJR4C&smid=url-share

Loren Grush, The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts (Scribner, 2023).

Bruce Weber, “Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura on ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 89,” New York Times (July 31, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/31/obituaries/nichelle-nichols-deaf.html

“NASA Astronaut Dr. Ellen Ochoa,” Johnson Space Center, 2019, https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/about/[people/orgs/bios/ochoa.html