Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Sally got so hooked on flying, she took private pilot lessons and got her license. Then she bought a part-interest in a small Grumman Tiger owned by another astronaut, which she often took up by herself on weekends.

  In her steel-toed boots and bright blue flight suit with pockets that zipped to eternity, Sally found the jet version of her hometown joy rides. “It’s the same feeling that I used to get driving a car with the windows down on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles,” she told me. “You know, being a little bit above everything, being able to see a lot, having the wind blow in your face.”

  And she, like the other women, measured up. “We passed the tests,” Sally said. “We didn’t get sick.”

  Mission specialists needed to know how to fly in case something happened to the pilot or the plane. Early into her training, Sally copied down an ominous set of instructions called “Non-Pilot M[ission] S[pecialist] Procedure for Incapacitated Pilot.” Among the bullet points: how to turn on intercom, how to communicate MAYDAY, how to eject: “If possible, select an area and aircraft course that will allow ejection over a relatively unpopulated land area with later aircraft impact in the water or other unpopulated area.”

  That terrifying possibility was rehearsed in the shark-and mosquito-infested waters off Miami, Florida. For three days in July, all the non-military AsCans reported to Homestead Air Force Base for Water Survival Training, jumping into the bay from a fifteen-foot tower and being towed through the waves while tethered to a parachute harness, or parasailing from the deck of a landing craft then plunging into the water wearing full survival gear. They also were set adrift on one-person life rafts, with a fishing line. Sally later joked about finding herself bedraggled, her hair dripping, and asking, “If I’m supposed to be smart, what am I doing here?” She actually enjoyed the parasailing, but was less pleased when a photographer focused on her being hoisted by a helicopter and asked for “a happy look.” Or when a reporter asked her to cite the high point of her day. “Four hundred feet,” she said.

  The astronauts found the press particularly pesky that week; the appeal of six women getting soaked to the skin brought out the worst in them. One television reporter yelled “Hey, Miss,” to Rhea Seddon, who glared back and retorted, “It’s ‘Doctor.’ ”

  THE WOMEN

  The crowd-pleasing novelty of female astronauts was reflected in a headline from the Los Angeles Times:

  SIX WOMEN ASTRONAUTS BEGIN TRAINING

  NEW GROUP INCLUDES BLACKS, ORIENTAL.

  Putting aside the ethnic reference to Ellison Onizuka, a US Air Force captain of Japanese descent from Hawaii (it was 1978), the headline managed to erase twenty-five astronauts from the program. Which is precisely how the press treated them, starting the day they were first announced back in January. “I could have mooned the press corps and I would not have been noticed,” writes Mike Mullane. “The white TFNG males were invisible.”

  AsCan Kathy Sullivan articulated the moment that many remember as producing “ten interesting people and twenty-five standard white guys.” After the press conference introducing them, “the twenty-five standard white guys were done [in] about 4.3 seconds,” she says, “and had the whole rest of the day free… . The other ten of us, we were there … way late.” Being interviewed. Being photographed. Being asked—women only—about their goals, their beaux, their bodies.

  For women in the rest of America, it was a heady time. The republic had survived a number of feminist incursions into its institutions: the integration of Harvard, Yale and Princeton (1969), the first female elected governor without succeeding her spouse (Ella Grasso, Connecticut, 1974), the first woman to drive in the Indianapolis 500 (Janet Guthrie, 1977), whose pre-Indy breakthrough had inspired the race announcer to declare, “Janet and Gentlemen, start your engines!” That same year, Joanie Caucus of the Doonesbury comic strip got her fictional law degree, as did growing numbers of real women. And at the National Women’s Conference in Houston, with only three states needed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, Liz Carpenter, who had also served as press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson, declared, “If I die, don’t send flowers. Just send three more states.”

  As barriers fell, Americans of both genders grew more comfortable with what the Washington Post once called, “the ultra-radical notion that women are human beings.” To many in the media, however, a female astronaut remained in that special category reserved by Samuel Johnson for a female minister in the eighteenth century. A woman preaching, he said, is like a dog walking on its hind legs. One is not surprised that it is done well, but that it is “done at all.”

  Rhapsodic stories depicting six smart women navigating “a man’s world” ran in publications from Paris Match to My Weekly Reader. They were an exceptionally talented group, but each of the six was quickly codified into a caricature that would follow her through her career:

  Anna Fisher, twenty-nine, the petite, porcelain-skinned surgeon who wanted to be an astronaut since she was twelve; known as the “skinny brain” in high school; beat out her husband to get the job. Redbook magazine would put her on their cover and feature her in several additional articles.

  Shannon Lucid, thirty-five, the oldest and tallest (5′11″) of the women, and the only one with children (two girls, one boy, aged two to nine), whose husband had followed her to Houston; born in Shanghai to missionary parents, educated (biochemistry) and residing in Oklahoma, passionate about planes and spaceflight since childhood.

  Judy Resnik, twenty-nine, electrical engineer from Akron, Ohio, invariably described as a raven-haired beauty with a quick tongue; “I was not one of the ‘in crowd,’ ” she said of her high school years. “I was one of the smart ones. It was hard to be both.”

  Margaret “Rhea” [pronounced Ray] Seddon, thirty, self-described “girly girl” from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, “a tomboy who could crochet,” with a blonde, shoulder-length halo and a silver Corvette. As the only female surgical intern at a Memphis hospital, she was denied entry in the doctors’ lounge, so relaxed between operations on a chair in the nurses’ restroom instead.

  Kathy Sullivan, twenty-six, geologist and oceanographer from California (who discovered that she and Sally had attended grammar school together one year), gravitated towards Earth science because “those folks were outdoors all the time and had much cooler adventures”; sturdy athlete at 5′6″; got addicted to flying from her father.

  Like Sally, who would forever be shorthanded as the tennis-playing astrophysicist, each of the six had carved out a nontraditional career in a world of often limited expectations. They were, in the words of one of the interviewing psychiatrists, “their own persons, people who have decided for themselves what they wanted to do and have listened less to what others might think.”

  But in a world still hung up on 1950s notions of femininity, blocking out the static was suddenly less of an option.

  “Everyone was watching them,” says Carolyn Huntoon, referring not only to the public, but to the scrutiny of the bosses and the worker bees at NASA. “And they all knew that.” Huntoon, a biochemist in middle management, was asked to step in as the unofficial den mother for the six women, responsible for everything from hairdryers in the gym to wise and reliable counsel for the sociological venture that no one could have been prepared for. “She made our lives much, much easier,” Sally said. “[S]he’s one of the very few people that I think I owe my career to.”

  Huntoon banished bigotry with finesse. “One astronaut told me that he didn’t have any problem with the women in the class, but his wife did,” she tells me. “I turned to him and said, ‘That’s your problem, not NASA’s problem.’ ” Another time, one of the male engineers (they were almost all male) said “one of the women astronauts had talked to him, questioning what he’d said, and he said, ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before!’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah? How about the guys, the astronauts, don’t they talk to you that way?’ Initially, it was hard for them to deal with women who were smart, who had
the courage to speak out, to ask difficult questions.”

  Sally told a reporter, “None of these men had ever been to a meeting where there was a woman who did something other than take notes.” It was, she said, understandable. “Out of roughly four thousand technical employees at the Johnson Space Center,” she said, “I think there were only four women. So that gives you a sense of how male the culture was. When we arrived, we more than doubled the number of women with PhDs at the center.”

  At early conferences, someone invariably complained, “There’s no one from the Astronaut Office here,” looking right through the female AsCan in the room. Kathy Sullivan recalls the curt dismissal she felt at Mojave Airport in California, after a day of flying in T-38s. When they landed on the desert strip and started walking out on the ramp, her colleague, one of the male astronaut pilots, spotted legendary airman Chuck Yeager and shouted out, “Hello! I want to introduce you to Kathy Sullivan. She’s flying chase.” Sullivan tells me what happened next. “Yeager paused midstride, looked back over his shoulder with quite a sneering look on his face and said, ‘Riding, maybe. Ain’t flying.’ And stalked off!”

  Carolyn Huntoon understood the problem. “As soon as the more mature individuals began to depart, things got better.” Some at NASA learned on the job. Alan Bean, who walked on the Moon in 1969 and then oversaw the TFNG’s early training, dropped his distrust when he heard one of the women lecture on the shuttle’s protective tile system. “She knows more about heat shields than I do,” he acknowledged. “It’s not a male thing.”

  But the key may have been the women themselves. “There was a real nervousness about having them there,” says historian Margaret Weitekamp. To combat it, “I believe those women in the 1978 class came in with the explicit attitude that there’s not a problem unless we say there’s a problem, and we’re not going to say there’s a problem. A lot of these astronauts made things work for themselves because they were the people who were invested in making it work.”

  That was certainly true of Sally, whose ingrained optimism led her to believe—pretty accurately, as it turns out—that she could succeed wherever she chose. And if she couldn’t, she moved on to the next square. Now she had five colleagues to help hurdle any obstacles, safety in numbers, thanks to NASA’s wisdom in selecting more than one woman for that first class.

  Not that they made a pact or shared deep secrets. In fact, the six original female astronauts had little in common beyond their passion to fly, their will to succeed and their distrust of the press. They were friends, not bosom buddies; allies, not blood sisters. But they came together unhesitatingly on issues of common concern, from big questions of policy supervised by Huntoon, to smaller, trivial ones they could solve themselves. Early on, Sally and Anna Fisher slipped off to the mall to buy some khakis and plaid shirts, “the kind the guys wore around the office,” Fisher tells me. “We wanted to blend in with everybody and have our technical expertise speak for itself.” I ask if they also bought short sleeve shirts and pocket protectors. “Oh no! We didn’t want to blend in that much!”

  It was a rivalry—a friendly rivalry. Only by working as a team would they fly the shuttle successfully. But once the shuttle started flying, only one crew would go at a time—two to five people at most. Of the six women, only one would be first. The problem was, no one had a clue how to be that person.

  “There had been the first man on the Moon, the first man in space, the first man to orbit the Earth—there’s going to be a first American woman in space,” Bill Colson remembers thinking, “and that person is going to be in the same ballpark. And that’s a big deal. Everybody knew that from day one.” I ask if Sally was drooling for it. “No. Inside she might have been. But it wasn’t something I could see.” He says they did discuss other candidates. “There were people who would fall asleep in meetings and we’d check that box and say, ‘Okay, that person is not going to go.’ And Sally would tell me about little things at the office, like, ‘This person will be better in public than someone else.’ It was very apparent that NASA was realizing their budget hinged a surprising amount on the success of the astronauts and how they presented to the world and to the United States. So they were really paying attention to that.”

  Bill and Sally narrowed the field—in their own minds—to three: Sally, Anna and Judy. Which is pretty much how everyone else I spoke to saw it. “And she never said anything nasty about anyone, we just talked about it. And she was doing well, so we could kind of say that she possibly had a really famous future.”

  They weren’t alone.

  “We would all get caught up in it now and then and worry and obsess about it,” recalls Kathy Sullivan. “There clearly was some kind of a horse race or beauty contest.” She came up with her own shorthand guide to how the female typecasting in the media and elsewhere might factor into the minds of those picking the woman to fly first: “blonde surgeon” (Rhea), “flirtatious single gal” (Judy), “Photogenic … married gal” (Anna), “slender” (Sally), “taller, stockier … married” (Shannon), “not a cover girl type” (herself).

  “The agency,” Sullivan said, “was eventually going to have to pick one of us.”

  The “agency,” in the minds of many of the astronauts, was a euphemism for George Abbey, the sphinxlike director of Flight Operations (later, director of Flight Crew Operations) who chaired the committee that chose the Thirty-five New Guys (and four subsequent classes) in the first place. He was also known to control crew selection, although John Young claimed that responsibility, too. “I guess you could say, John felt he picked them and I felt that I picked them,” Abbey tells me, sharing the Astroturf for the record. Technically, Young’s office was the origin of such decisions, and he was certainly included in all discussions, but most of the astronauts understood that the real power belonged to the man they usually called Mr. Abbey. Sally did a fine impression of him. She’d lower her eyelids, mumble “rrrrrrr” deep and low, then ask for a beer. She didn’t try to mimic his silver buzz cut or sturdy torso. “We had absolutely no idea what his thought process was,” she would later confess. “And the more time you spent trying to figure that out, the less you really understood it.” A veteran of an earlier class says, admiringly, that Abbey was “the epitome of eccentricity and inscrutability. There were astronauts chosen because they were very good second basemen, or because they could play a wicked trombone. I am not making this up.” Another astronaut calls him “more like a chess player than a checkers player. He thinks many moves, and years, ahead.”

  Abbey was the guy who emphasized the need for team players at NASA, including the one playing softball on Monday nights. I saw astronauts break every date they had when Abbey summoned them to the softball field. Or to the annual Flight Operations Directorate Chili Cook-off he organized. “There was a lot of jockeying for position,” a member of a later class tells me, “trying to figure out how they decide. Some people were better at sucking up to George than at being an astronaut. If he didn’t like you, you were marginalized.” Abbey’s mythic status as the man responsible for astronaut careers was whimsically acknowledged during the fifth space shuttle mission, when a photograph of the powerful one was carried into orbit and taped to the middeck lockers. A NASA camera recorded the tribute for the world.

  The enigma of crew selection would also provide a rare moment of humor during the somber hearings investigating the 1986 Challenger explosion. Henry Hartsfield, a widely respected pilot of one shuttle flight and commander of two, was asked, “How is the decision made as to which astronaut should fly on a particular launch?” His answer set off knowing laughter: “A lot of us wish we knew that.”

  George Abbey, a graduate of the Naval Academy who became an Air Force pilot (and whose own application to be an astronaut was blocked by the Air Force selection board because he hadn’t gone to test pilot school), seemed to populate the early shuttle flights with more Navy than Air Force guys. That wouldn’t help Sally. But she shared the view of a colleague who says
of Abbey, “I’m very proud of his work. Out of all the flights, the incidents where astronauts screwed up was minuscule.”

  Sally kept her head down and worked hard, well aware that brains and dedication had distinguished more previous astronauts than double plays at home plate. Just in case, she kept her baseball glove oiled.

  FLYING THE ARM

  Sally’s first real project was a plum. She was assigned to the shuttle’s Canadian-built, robot “arm”—the $100 million flying crane called the Remote Manipulator System (RMS) that would be used to lift satellites into orbit and retrieve them from the sky. And any number of other tasks. Along with the astronaut team already in place, she helped verify that the simulators in Houston accurately modeled the real arm, regularly traveling to the original simulator in Toronto to help develop procedures for using the arm in orbit. With its articulated joints at the “shoulder,” “elbow” and “wrist,” and almost as much dexterity as a human arm, the 50-foot-long, 900-pound artificial limb was a critical part of the shuttle’s future. But, Sally understood, “until you actually start using something, it’s very difficult to make predictions on how well it’s going to work … How do you know exactly that you’re lifting a satellite cleanly out of the payload bay and not bumping it into the structure? … What limits should be put on the use of the arm to make sure that it’s kept well within its design constraints?” With tiny, neat printing on graph paper in green marbleized composition books, Sally recorded page after page of notes, most impossible to understand without an engineering degree, like “an op amp failure in the demodulator” and an “OSOP review mtg,” just for example. Within a year, Sally would run the RMS office.