NASA astronaut
Sally K. Ride was the first US woman to fly in space, June 18, 1983, on the seventh US space shuttle mission. Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper seeking applicants for the space program.
As a result, she joined
NASA in 1978.
Before her first space flight, she received a lot of media attention due to her gender. During a press conference, she was asked really stupid questions like "Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?" and "Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?"
During her career, Ride served as the ground-based 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.
She died on July 23, 2012 after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer.
