Sally's Joy Ride into the Sky

By Frederic Golden

The first American woman to fly in space shows she has got the Right Stuff

A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges ... The idea was to prove at every foot of the way that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even--ultimately, God willing, one day--that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

--Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Brotherhood indeed! True, those male jet jockeys opened the space age with daredevil rides in rinky-dink tin capsules and kangaroo hops across the lunar wasteland. But move over, buddy. The women are coming, breaching that old space boys' club and bursting into what Ms. magazine sardonically calls NASA's world of "flaming, phallic rockets." During the next shuttle launch, sitting right there behind the skipper and his copilot, watching those blinking dials and video displays with her eagle eyes, will be Sally Kristen Ride, 32, former schoolgirl tennis star, Ph.D. in physics, cool, witty and attractive, and the possessor of just about as much of the Right Stuff as any man who ever preceded her into space.

NASA, to be sure, is keeping its bureaucratic composure; there has been no flamboyant talk about one giant step for womankind. The fact that Sally Ride will be drifting in the cosmos, the first American woman in space, gets only the barest mention in the press handout for the upcoming flight of the Challenger, scheduled for Saturday morning, June 18. NASA'S flacks spend most of their energy detailing much more mundane aspects of the seventh shuttle mission: that it will carry aloft two more communications satellites, one Canadian, the other Indonesian; that the five-man (oops!) -member crew will be the largest yet launched in any space vehicle; and that the 100-ton craft will glide to a landing for the first time on a new three-mile strip at Florida's Kennedy Space Center rather than on the Western deserts, where there is more room for error.

Team player that she is, Ride insists that her participation in the flight, which will pack her into a small, camper-size cabin for a week with four men, is "no big deal." Says she: "I didn't come into the space program to be the first woman in space. I came in to get a chance to fly as soon as I could." Certainly there is nothing intrinsically extraordinary about her achievement. Women have been doing just about everything else in recent years, even piloting jet aircraft as big or bigger than the shuttle. So why not space? Indeed, in a Marxist-Leninist bow to women's lib, the Soviets launched a woman cosmonaut precisely 20 years ago, though a second did not follow until last summer (see box). "It's too bad," scowls Ride, "that society isn't to the point yet where the country could just send up a woman astronaut and nobody would think twice about it."

Still, whether she likes it or not, her flight has gripped the public fancy. She has been interviewed again and again by newspapers and television. Last week at a White House luncheon for the Challenger crew--the only one given so far before a shuttle flight--President Reagan gave her an extra share of his attention. Nothing, it seems, symbolizes the progress of American women in the past decade quite so much as the vision of a female astronaut climbing toward the stars.

Sally's ride--the word play is irresistible--is, however, only one sign of a major change in what can no longer properly be called the U.S. manned space program. In fact, the elite circle has all but become a melting pot. Among its 78 members, there are now four blacks, two Jews and one naturalized American who happens to be part Chinese. Two Europeans, a German and a Dutchman, are training for a shuttle flight later this year. But NASA seems to feel no particular guilt about its past neglect.

Explains Christopher Kraft, former director of the Johnson Space Center: "There were no women in the beginning because they didn't meet the qualifications. The men were all test pilots. They were used to life-and-death situations and put their lives on the line every day." In other words, the space agency did not believe it could find female pilots good enough to handle the challenge of space flight.

All that is now chauvinist history. Moreover, much of the daredevil aspect has gone out of space travel. No longer are astronauts subjected to bone-crunching lift-offs or breathtaking splash-downs into the Pacific. The shuttle has made the going easy. NASA is even talking of inviting ordinary folk along for rides. Marvels Kraft: "They're flying in shirtsleeves." Along with the improving conditions has come a change of emphasis. The object is not simply getting into orbit but actually working there. As a result, says veteran Director of Flight Operations George Abbey, "the pilot's job is no longer the prime job." Increasingly, the responsibilities of a mission--and indeed the entire shuttle program--will fall upon a new breed of astronauts called mission specialists.

Being one of those pioneers is more important to Ride than all the first-female flutter. Like her, the specialists are being recruited largely from the ranks of young scientists. It will be their job to perform in orbit the complex tasks that NASA envisions, including experiments aboard the European-built Spacelab, a self-contained laboratory that will be carried in the shuttle's cargo hold later in the year. Already under way in earlier flights are a wide range of experiments, from creating superpure pharmaceuticals to growing near perfect crystals for the electronics industry. Indeed NASA hopes to show by such work that the shuttle, which has recently come under criticism as economically unviable, will eventually more than repay the original $10 billion investment. Mission-specialist skills will also play a key role in what NASA hopes to make its next major project: the establishment of a permanent station in orbit where men and women can work for weeks or even months at a time.

As a mission specialist, Ride will not pilot the shuttle. On takeoff and landing, she will sit just behind Challenger's commander, Bob Crippen, 45, who flew on the initial shuttle flight and is the first to get a second shuttle mission, and Co-Pilot Frederick Hauck, 42, a rookie. Monitoring the flood of data from the instrument panel, Ride will in effect be the flight engineer. If an emergency occurs, she will suggest special corrective procedures. But Ride's primary responsibility will come later, when she is set to operate the shuttle's 50-ft.-long mechanical arm, or Remote Manipulator System.

On the mission's fifth day, the cherry-picker-like device will be used to play an intriguing game of extraterrestrial catch that could be crucial to the shuttle's future. The arm will hoist a specially designed payload out of the big cargo bay and toss it overboard; then, after the shuttle swoops around the temporary satellite for some nine hours, Ride and her unique arm will try to grapple it back on board. The experiment is a test of the shuttle's ability to retrieve and repair ailing satellites; at least one of those now in orbit will get shuttle-delivered doctoring on a future mission if Ride is successful.

She ought to be, having spent three years mastering the finicky Canadian-built contraption. In long sessions with the builders, she even helped work out corrective procedures in case of a breakdown. One reason Ride won a seat on the flight is that she and another crewmate, Mission Specialist John Fabian, 44, are NASA's premier operators of the arm. Says Abbey: "She and Fabian are probably equally good."

Ride's origins are as all-American as her achievements. She grew up in Encino, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, reading a lot of science fiction as well as Nancy Drew and James Bond. Her father Dale taught political science at Santa Monica College; her mother Joyce stayed home with Sally and her younger sister Karen. Neither parent pushed her in any particular direction, "except to make sure I studied and brought home the right kind of grades."

By junior high school, Sally had become good enough in tennis to achieve national ranking. She also won a partial scholarship to Westlake, a girls' private school in Los Angeles. There, largely through the inspiration of a physiology teacher from U.C.L.A., she caught the science bug; she pursued that interest in college, first at Swarthmore, then at Stanford, to which she switched in her sophomore year. After two solid years of science and math, she turned to the humanities ("I needed a break from the equations") and fell in love with Shakespeare. In 1973 she graduated with a B.S. in physics and a B. A. in English.

In spite of encouragement from Billie Jean King, Ride decided to quit tennis and go on to full-time graduate studies in astrophysics at Stanford. By 1978 she had a doctorate but no job. When NASA advertised for the first time in ten years for astronaut-scientists, she became one of 8,370 applicants. After grueling physical and mental examinations, including a session with two NASA psychiatrists who tried to crack her now celebrated composure, Ride was one of 35 candidates picked, six of them women. The other female "Ascans" (NASA slang for astronaut candidates) were equally talented: Judith Resnik, a doctor of electrical engineering; Anna Fisher, an M.D.; Kathryn Sullivan, a Ph.D. in geology; Surgeon Rhea Seddon; and Biochemist Shannon Lucid.

Why was Ride chosen? She speculates about her strengths: "A good educational background and one that showed I could learn new things readily." Abbey, who was on the selection panel, has another explanation: Ride is a team player. Those who are determined to do their own thing, he says, "probably wouldn't be happy here." Ride clearly was. She enjoyed flights in NASA's two-seat T-38 trainers so much that she went on to get her private pilot's license. She threw herself enthusiastically into parachute training, scuba diving and even stomach-churning flights aboard a NASA KC-135 transport, whose high-speed arcs gave the Ascans a brief, exhilarating taste of weightlessness.

At first, some old hands in the brotherhood, like Moonwalker Al Bean, who instructed the new recruits, doubted that women could tackle such "male things" as spacecraft and computers. But as Ride and the other women demonstrated their mettle--actually she had spent many hours in graduate school at computer terminals--Bean had a change of heart. The women, he finally agreed, performed as well as the men. In 1980, encouraged by the female experience, NASA added two more women to the astronaut corps.

Though no quarter was given in the training, some sensible accommodation was made to cope with the differences between the sexes. To adapt to shorter limbs (Ride is 5 ft. 5 in.), shuttle seats were built so that they could slide like those in a car. Optional grooming aids were added to the personal kits of the astronauts (though Ride pointedly has not said whether she will wear lipstick or powder for the inevitable orbital TV shows). Included as well are tampons, linked together lest one drift off when the box is opened. The shuttle's single privy was already designed with women in mind. Instead of the flexible hose used by the male-only crews of the old Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, NASA provided a wide cuplike attachment that fits over the crotch. A curtain is being added to give Ride some privacy, though she did not ask for it. Notes Astronaut Mary Cleave, an environmental engineer: "Guys don't like to perform vital functions in front of everybody either."

NASA doctors do not expect any special medical problems with Ride or any other woman in space. Says Dr. Sam Poole, the Johnson Space Center's medical chief: "I don't think women will respond any differently from men." Though anecdotal evidence suggests that women are more susceptible to motion sickness, none of the spinning tests conducted by NASA has supported the theory. Nor are the space agency's doctors particularly worried about the reportedly greater inclination of women toward the bends. Doctors say that any problems can be easily averted by longer prebreathing sessions before and after a space walk.

Like her sister astronauts, Ride has mostly been treated like one of the guys Says she: "Crip won't even open a door for me anymore." Ever since the mission earn selection was announced 14 months ago, Ride and her crewmates have spent most of their waking hours together. The fifth member of the group, Norman Thagard, 39, another mission specialist, was added only last December. As a physician, he will investigate a nagging difficulty of space travel: the initial queasiness, or "space adaptation syndrome," that seems to afflict about 50% of all astronauts in their first few days of weightlessness. The Challenger team members share an office at the Johnson Space Center. They practice endlessly in the shuttle cockpit simulator, rehearsing every conceivable facet of the mission, including possible emergencies. They have come to be as close-knit as a family, even to the extent of protecting Ride from an overly inquisitive press. When she quietly married fellow Astronaut Steve Hawley last July (he will fly on the twelfth shuttle flight with Resnik), her Challenger comrades respected her wish to keep her private life private.

Ride has earned her colleagues' trust and high regard. Says Crippen, who as skipper had veto power over all the crew choices: "You like people who stay calm under duress. And Sally can do that. She hit all the squares." Her sister, who has become a Presbyterian minister, calls her a tough, no-nonsense competitor: "Sally will wipe you out every time." Adds Molly Tyson, an old Stanford roommate: "I've never seen Sally trip, on or off the court, physically or intellectually."

With such displays of combativeness and composure under pressure, it would seem that the shuttle program is in good hands, whether they are male or female.

--By Frederic Golden. Reported by Sam Allis/Houston and Jerry Hannifin/Washington

With reporting by Sam Allis, Jerry Hannifin This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.