Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Expulsion was never a risk for Molly. She was, however, surprised not only by the request from NASA, but by the government agent—“maybe he had a trench coat”—who showed up at her office to do a background check on Sally. Molly found the encounter so bizarre, she recounted his questions in a sardonic article for womenSports, the magazine she was editing in New York:

  Did the candidate drink, smoke, or take drugs? Was she a good leader, a good follower? How did she react to stress, to emergencies? Did she keep her room neat, hair combed? I got flustered only once—trying to explain how Sally could be simultaneously a good leader and a good follower; otherwise I was a model witness, and I only lied once. But I figured that dust and dirty dishes wouldn’t accumulate in a space capsule the way they had in our apartment.

  When I ask Molly whether the guy in the trench coat asked about sexual orientation, she says, “I don’t recall any questions that required me to lie about our personal life.”

  No one I spoke to remembers any such queries. Homosexuality could—and did—get people fired for security reasons back in 1977, due to the possibility of blackmail in a closeted era. But NASA wasn’t asking.

  The agency did, however, seek out its own sources, getting in touch with people who might provide a more unbiased view of each applicant.

  Arthur Walker, Sally’s doctoral advisor, called her “very bright … with some originality—not as much as others … can work independently (to some degree) once problem is defined; very thoughtful and analytical … even-tempered.” Then, in a phrase that may well have sealed the deal, Walker, who had directed the big team projects she had worked on at Stanford, called her “good at working with difficult people.”

  Teamwork was critical to the Selection Board. “You’ve got to be able to work well with others,” says George Abbey, who, as the head of Flight Operations, also ran the board. “It’s not a place for someone who wants to be a star unto himself or herself.” They were, he says, looking for people with “a good education, well disciplined, who did things over and above their area of interest. Someone who had worked under stress.” In short, not just accomplished scientists or engineers, but generalists, people who also worked, say at a sport. Duane Ross, the personnel manager who functioned as head of the Astronaut Selection Office, adds, “We definitely had an interest in women and minority candidates.”

  NASA narrowed the field to 208 finalists, just over half of whom were applicants for mission specialists. Of the latter, 21 were female. All were invited to Houston for the next step, in ten separate groups over as many weeks.

  THE INTERVIEW

  Sally, still at Stanford, still plugging away at her thesis, got the call late in September 1977. Could she come to the Johnson Space Center on October 2—all expenses paid—for a week of medical tests and interviews for the astronaut selection program? A follow-up mailgram instructed her to bring gym clothes and running shoes, and advised her to avoid food, alcohol and caffeine for twenty-four hours prior to the physical exam. Sally telephoned Susan Okie with the news. “She was really excited,” Okie says. “She said that this was a big deal, and she was going to call back when she got the word.”

  Sally was more than excited. She was apprehensive. “I didn’t know whether they were going to throw us into a centrifuge or hang us from the ceiling by our toes,” she later confessed. But there were no ice water drips, no spinning chairs, no inkblot tests. Instead, along with nineteen starry-eyed young men—Sally was the only female in her group—she got her first look at the Johnson Space Center and sat through a series of briefings on the shuttle and its operation. She posed for what look like posture pictures in her bra and shorts (front, side and center) with her jaw clenched in a “when will this be over?” look. Doctors examined her eyes, her ears and her brain; she carried a blue flight bag containing a jar for the urine that had to be collected for twenty-four hours. NASA would find no foul substances in her body. Except for a mild caffeine addiction (at least four cups of coffee a day), Sally indicated that she drank only a few glasses of beer a week, only two glasses of wine a month. Her squeaky clean regime was confirmed several years earlier when, on a trip to Berkeley with a friend, she wandered around drug-friendly Telegraph Avenue “graciously declining offers of speed, hash and acid.” Sally’s addiction of choice that day was a hot fudge sundae.

  At NASA, she told physicians that she jogged more than twenty miles a week, acing the NASA cardio test on the treadmill. She stayed on the machine at maximum effort for a record seventeen pounding minutes—far more than most people can manage—only stopping when her legs started to cramp. “One of the best TM [treadmill] performances by a female candidate seen at this lab so far,” wrote the astonished doctor.

  She was quizzed, for about forty-five minutes each, by two psychiatrists whose roles have been described by every astronaut I know as a good-shrink-bad-shrink tag team. Psych 1, as they called him, asked friendly questions: “Tell me about your sister.” “Tell me about yourself.” “Do you love your mother?” Everyone liked Psych 1. Psych 2 was there to rattle them. “Count backwards by seven.” “Name five American presidents.” When Sally recited the list from George Washington onward, he said, “That would be very good. Now what about the one you left out?” “Huh?” she asked. “Left out?” The process was unsettling, on purpose. A nervous candidate from another group remembers being asked, “ ‘Do you want a Coke?’ And I remember thinking, do I want a Coke? How should I answer that? If I say ‘Yes’ and he brings me a Coke, should I offer to pay for it? So in the end I said I didn’t want a Coke.” The memory still makes him laugh. He was also asked, “ ‘What would you do if you found a letter on the street as you were walking by?’ And I think I asked him, ‘Is there a stamp on it?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ So I said, ‘Probably mail it.’ ”

  The psychiatrists “were just there to see if we were crazy or not. It was a pass-fail system,” explains one of the astronauts who made it through. She was asked what kind of animal she’d be if she were reincarnated. A dolphin, she said. Most of the men said, “stallions.” Another woman was asked what she’d like to come back as, if she were run over by a garbage truck. “In the selection process, you can’t really test for normal people,” Huntoon says. “You look for abnormal things. We were looking for anyone with, really, problems that would prevent them from doing the job.” It’s called screening out, as opposed to screening in, “to identify those applicants most likely to perform effectively under the stress of spaceflight.”

  There was another, more obvious stress test. Sally was zipped into a yard-wide fabric ball—a prototype “rescue sphere” that might be used to transfer astronauts from one shuttle to another. She had oxygen but no light, and no indication how long she’d be enclosed. Afterwards, probably no more than fifteen minutes or so, she was asked to detail her reaction. “Although there was more room than I expected,” she wrote in her placid, postbubble appraisal, “I was glad I’m not a couple of inches taller—after about 5 minutes it got a little cramped. The climate inside was fairly comfortable, but started getting stuffy toward the end.”

  She was also asked to write a one-page essay on why she wanted to go into space, an assignment that must have seemed scarier than a blue book. Sally steered a safe course around her qualifications, with barely a hint of her excitement.

  I’m very much a product of the media’s fascination with the early space flights and lunar landings, and I suspect that everyone who watched Walter Cronkite’s enraptured accounts from “the cape” has dreamt of trading places with the astronaut… . I’ve been fascinated with space ever since those early telecasts, but never really thought it would be possible for me to become an astronaut—my chances of getting certification as a test pilot appeared pretty slim then. Going up in space didn’t look feasible, but studying it from the ground did… . Now that the space program has evolved to the point where (a) astronauts are being selected from the scientific community, and (b) women are being considered, I feel that
I’m being offered an incredible opportunity. Further, I think that my background (the scientific training in general, and astrophysics experience in particular) qualifies me to contribute as much to the program as I expect to get out of it.

  The final hurdle was the hour-long interview with the Selection Committee. This was the one that counted—the one that was impossible to prepare for. “There weren’t any right or wrong answers. It was just how they went about responding and handling themselves,” explains Carolyn Huntoon. She says the questions were as bland as “ ‘What did you do on your summer vacation? Do you have siblings? How do you get along?’ One of the issues we used to look at is, were people willing to make changes? Anybody that was willing to take a chance and do something different.” They also wanted scientists who had not yet gotten too far down a path of research or teaching, “because it would be very hard for them to give it up. Assessing applicants’ operational skills was very important.”

  Nothing was gender-specific. Humor was appreciated—to a point. One candidate, asked why he wanted to be an astronaut, said, “My father was an astronaut. My grandfather was an astronaut. My great-grandfather was an astronaut. It’s a tradition in my family.” The panel laughed, and turned him down. And there was at least one trick question. “We knew they all talked to each other, so we’d put in a question and then change it,” George Abbey said. “Like something about the Panama Canal. Then when another candidate came in and we didn’t ask the question, he said, ‘You were supposed to ask about Panama.’ We flunked him in intelligence.”

  THE WAIT

  Sally returned to her studies at Stanford more eager than she’d imagined after playing astronaut-for-a-week. She’d grown close to her fellow candidates, connecting more than competing. And laughing off the fact that some of the meetings had started with, “You guys will … ah … you guys and Miss … ah Ms. Ride.” She also noticed that while they were being interviewed, workmen were adding a women’s locker room to the astronaut gym. Would she be back to use it? Before applying to NASA, she had never considered flying in space; now, it was all she wanted to do.

  One day in October, she drove down to the Mojave desert near Los Angeles to join some of her fellow candidates at Edwards Air Force Base watching the test landing of Enterprise, a prototype of the 75-ton shuttle. With no engines for acceleration, but with two pilots at the controls—a dead-stick landing, just like the real thing—Enterprise was dropped from the back of a Boeing 747 to glide down to the runway on Earth. Britain’s Prince Charles, a pilot himself, was also there to witness the touchdown—unusually bumpy with three unplanned bounces. “Up until this morning I wasn’t afraid at all,” Sally admitted in a letter to Molly. “It never entered my mind that there were actual risks involved. But seeing that landing this morning, knowing that they couldn’t pull up for another try—that scared me.”

  She got over it. In San Francisco, she and Bill took his young sons to see Star Wars, the first in the series, and Sally hung a poster from the movie on her office wall, right next to a map of the heavens. As she sat beneath both and tried to complete the calculations for her thesis, she fretted about the outcome. “I had trouble finishing writing my dissertation,” she later said, “because a group of us that had been down there interviewing were all the time calling each other saying, ‘Have you heard anything? When do you think they’re going to make the decision?’ ”

  • • •

  Waiting to learn her future, Sally cast a rare glimpse into her past. She attended a Westlake reunion at Don the Beachcomber’s in Marina Del Rey, turning a cynical eye towards some of her conspicuously consuming classmates. No longer democratized by their navy blue uniforms, they seemed more focused on their fingernails and their wealth. It was an event Sally had been avoiding—“subconsciously,” she suspected—because she hadn’t gotten over the awful shock that Elizabeth Mommaerts, her idol, her beloved physiology professor, had succumbed to manic-depression and taken her own life. Sally’s mom, Joyce, had called Sally with the news, which left her “crushed. There was a long silence when I told her.” Mommaerts’s daughter, Edina Weinstein, speculates that Sally, like her mom, was “aware of how unacceptable it was to mom” to go through a mental breakdown, to no longer be logical and brilliant. After the Westlake reunion, Sally shared her sorrow with Sue Okie. “I think that’s going to stay with me for a long time,” she wrote. She told Sue that she’d been rereading the high school yearbook, and found Mommaerts’s inscription to her “absurdly appropriate: ‘Without words we always understood each other. Such a comfort in a noisy life.’ ” Sally appended the only curse word I ever knew her to utter. “Damn.”

  Then she pulled herself together and finished the letter with her own obsession. “I’ll fill you in on the astronaut business later (although I guess by the time you get this NASA will have either accepted or rejected me).”

  • • •

  In Houston, Sally’s application was working its way through the hierarchy. “She was young and didn’t have a lot of experience, but she looked like she had a lot of potential,” George Abbey tells me. He was especially taken with her tennis experience, that she “had worked well with people and had done science with others.” Carolyn Huntoon remembers her confidence in talking to the board. “We had some people come in who couldn’t look at any of us, or who mumbled.” Not Sally. Besides, Huntoon says, “She didn’t do any sucking up. Some candidates would flatter you and say, ‘I know all about your work.’ Sally was very direct.”

  In December, the decisions were made. “I chaired the Selection Board and we always met and deliberated as a group,” Abbey explains. “We discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the various candidates. I perhaps guided the discussion, but the board agreed,” he says modestly. That includes the selection of the six women. Then, Abbey presented the selections to Chris Kraft, the Johnson Space Center director, who was known as the father of the Mission Control Center. “And he bought off on it and that was it.” Abbey finalized the list at twenty pilots, twenty mission specialists, which is how Kraft submitted it to Dr. Robert Frosch, the NASA administrator, in Washington, DC, for official approval. The plan was to announce the new choices that month, and all the candidates had supplied telephone numbers where they’d be reachable through Christmas vacation. But everything was delayed when Frosch questioned the number of pilots. He wondered if there might be too many military members. Maybe, Frosch says now, “they over interpreted” his question—meaning, maybe JSC overreacted by trimming the list. JSC saw it as a mandate. “They wanted us to cut it down to thirty-five,” George Abbey recalls. A few weeks later, there were five fewer pilots (all white males), who were told to reapply next time. The longest and largest astronaut selection process in NASA history was complete. Now they just had to tell the new astronauts.

  THE PHONE CALL

  The call jolted Sally out of a deep sleep in the front bedroom of her house on College Avenue at Stanford. It was George Abbey, who tended to make major pronouncements in a maddeningly oblique manner. The conversation that January 16, 1978, went something like this:

  “Remember that job you applied for? You still interested in that?”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Well, we’d love to have you come join us.”

  It took Sally a minute to figure out what he was telling her. “I was asleep until halfway through the call,” she said. “I woke up in a hurry.”

  And then started jumping up and down. Sally called her parents, her sister, her old friend, Sue, who tells me, “The first thing she said was, ‘Hi! This is your friendly local astronaut.’ And that became her greeting whenever she called. She was really on Cloud Nine.” Before she knew it, she was also on television and in print, getting her first introduction to the insatiable, often ill-mannered, press. At a hastily called news conference arranged by Stanford (“My gosh, I was a PhD physics student. Press conferences were not a normal part of my day”), Sally faced a phalanx of cameras and an army of inane quest
ions from reporters who had apparently slept through the liberation of the American work force. “Aren’t you afraid of being in orbit with all those men?” asked one. “What’s the highest you’ve ever been before?” tried another. No, she said patiently to a third, “I don’t expect to run into any UFOs.” Photographers crowded into her cluttered office, climbing over astrophysics texts and computer printouts, a pile of faded jogging suits in the corner. Sally, even-tempered as ever, was accommodating. “They wanted me to go out running. So I went out and ran.”

  Sally was ecstatic, every inch the graduate student-turned-adventurer with her black turtleneck, slim jeans and shiny bangs flopping over her forehead. She understood fully the opportunity she had been handed. “Thirty years from now,” she told a reporter, “when they’re selling round-trip tickets to Mars, this might not be glamorous, but right now it’s your basic once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  Her parents shared the glory in their own idiosyncratic way. “My father, who hasn’t got a scientific bone in his body, never understood what I did as an astrophysicist,” Sally said. “Now that I’m an astronaut, his problem is solved!” Her mother spun it differently. With Sally going to space and her sister Bear studying to be a minister at a theological seminary, Joyce Ride said, “One of the two of them is going to heaven!”

  For Bear Ride, the exciting news was both a harbinger of her sister’s changed life and a rerun of their childhood roles. Several months later, facing her oral exams before the presbytery—the governing body for her ordination as a minister—she was full of anxiety, “sweating bullets, wanting to be as smart as possible,” she tells me. The committee, in her home presbytery, knew her (and her family) well, but Bear was anticipating “weird theological questions” to test her studies over four years. “And I walked in and the chair of the committee said, ‘Welcome. We’re so glad to see you. Just one question: What’s it like to be Sally Ride’s sister?” To her credit, Bear finds the episode amusing. “On the one hand, I was pleased not to have to translate the Hebrew scriptures for them,” she says. “On the other hand, it was just so bizarre!” Bear was ordained shortly afterwards. The family dynamic was secure.