by Lynn Sherr
An estimated half million people cheered the launch from cars, trucks, boats and tents lining KSC’s waterways and highways that morning. Some wore Sally Ride tee-shirts; others drank a rum cocktail called Sally’s First Ride, as Sallymania swept the Space Coast. A ten-year-old salesgirl peddled shuttle pencil sharpeners (“You pull out the exhaust to sharpen your pencil”). Wilson Pickett’s 1966 rock anthem, “Mustang Sally,” the one Sally said she had “been running from since I was fifteen,” blared over countless American radios: “Ride, Sally, Ride.” A restaurant marquee in Cocoa Beach made the lyrics more inclusive: “Ride, Sally Ride! And you guys can tag along, too!”
Every day for a week, there were stories about the mission—and its star mission specialist—in print and on the airwaves. Everywhere but the Soviet Union, where the government-controlled press instead ran two stories on her predecessor by twenty years, Valentina Tereshkova.
After anchoring the liftoff and preparing a piece for that evening’s newscast, I signed off with an “attaboy!” to the folks in charge, however belatedly. “Technologically, NASA is pushing towards the twenty-first century,” I said. “But in human terms, it has finally entered the twentieth.”
SALLY’S RIDE
NASA makes spaceflight look easy. You burst through the atmosphere, unbuckle the straps, then float like a leaf in the unrestrained universe of weightlessness. In fact, Sally felt “not disoriented, not strange, but mentally I was unused to not being able to control my body. I really flailed around.” Her audio reflections, recorded several months later, reveal a slightly longer adjustment to the alien environment that she’d inhabit for seven days. When she drifted down to the middeck area, retrieving something from her clothing locker was nothing like opening a dresser drawer at home: “I’d pull out a locker and I’d find myself unable to look at the contents, because I’d be stretched out holding the handle, with my feet out straight behind me. And things would come floating out. It took a long time to figure out how to grab onto something without you floating off faster than it does. How to contain all the things that really want to be floating around.”
Stowing her kneeboard (the tablet strapped to her thigh) in the locker required five full minutes; removing the harness she wore during liftoff and stuffing it into the storage bag “took me a lot longer than it should have, and a lot longer than it would have even a day later… . Anything I had to do that … required manipulating equipment or body … I didn’t know how to do it.” Sally remembered from her KC-135 flights that breaststroking, without the density of water, wouldn’t work. To swim through space, she had to push off something solid to get traction. She felt like a “baby deer” on a “frozen lake,” in a scene from a “slapstick comedy.”
She also felt tired, “a sudden and overwhelming urge to close my eyes. And it took all the strength I had to keep them open.” Assisting John Fabian in the launch of the first satellite “was a struggle,” she admitted, “getting the cameras set up—powered, selected, the right switches uncovered.” She stuck with the checklist and the Canadian communications satellite made it safely to orbit. Halfway through the sequence, she was alert again. She then took the lead on a similar set of commands—flipping switches, coordinating computer inputs—to deploy a communications satellite for the government of Indonesia. Several hours into the flight, Challenger had earned nearly $20 million for NASA.
When ground controllers later wished them a good night, after saying it had been a good day, Sally radioed back, “You think it was a good day for you? You should have been up here!”
• • •
Sally was thrilled that she never got ill, never needed medication for space adaptation syndrome, but, she said to her tape recorder, “I was aware that my stomach was there.” When the orbiter was positioned upside down, so that looking out the window meant looking down at Earth, she felt strange, “uncomfortable at first… . I liked being right side up.” That’s how she stayed for the first few hours. When she went below, she avoided floating down the ladder head first. When she ate her first meal, she couldn’t relax. “I couldn’t anchor myself without tightening muscles somewhere—generally stomach or back muscles, and that was uncomfortable for eating.”
But she did manage part of the turkey sandwich she’d packed into her pocket, then three hearty meals a day for the rest of the trip, from scrambled eggs (dehydrated, in a pouch, heated on electric coils in a small aluminum suitcase-like contraption) to an apple-grapefruit drink that she especially liked. Within a day or two, she was feeling not only fine, but superb.
• • •
Later that week, Sally and John Fabian floated up to the flight deck to take turns using the robot arm to lift yet another satellite out of Challenger’s cargo bay—the West German platform called SPAS-01 (Shuttle Pallet Satellite), a 15-foot-long flying Tinker Toy full of experiments. Fabian took the first shift, skillfully manipulating the hand controllers to stretch out the arm, grapple the SPAS and pluck it from the bay. The object was to drop it into space—in the same orbit as Challenger itself—so that Crippen and Hauck could fire some jets for a rendezvous, the first tests of the shuttle’s ability to maneuver in close proximity to another object. This would be critical for future missions, including docking with the still-unbuilt space station. Fabian’s turn went flawlessly.
So did Sally’s, a celestial game of toss and catch that would have made Sandy Koufax proud. The release, she said, felt just like the simulation. “But the act of going up and capturing a satellite was a little more scary.” In the simulators, “if you miss, it’s just a virtual arm going through a virtual payload, and no harm’s done… . I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh. This is real metal that will hit real metal if I miss. What if we don’t capture this satellite?’ ”
In the midst of the maneuvers, with the SPAS orbiting on its own, they went off script—with Crippen’s permission—to give Mission Control a surprise. Sally and Fabian had quietly worked out a procedure to manipulate the arm into the number 7—for this, the seventh mission. He worked the controls and she sent the signal to the satellite that activated its onboard camera, the timing carefully arranged, according to Fabian, “so that we could catch the space shuttle against that black sky with the horizon down below.” That was the picture they wanted, the first ever taken of the shuttle in orbit, a self-portrait with a pedigree.
“We spent a lot of time taking that picture,” Sally said, “so that everybody would know it was STS-7 that took it.”
Sally, have a ball!
—Steve Hawley’s advice to Sally before she launched
Whenever she could, Sally headed for Challenger’s windows and stared outside. The views she later described often combined what she’d seen from this and her subsequent flight. “I got to look at coral reefs off the coast of Australia,” she said of the view that has awed every astronaut. “I could see glaciers in the Himalayas, I could see deforestation in the Amazon.” She also saw smog over Los Angeles. When they passed over Florida, she could see all the way up the coast to New York.
In orbit, racing along at five miles per second, the space shuttle circles the Earth once every 90 minutes. I found that at this speed, unless I kept my nose pressed to the window, it was almost impossible to keep track of where we were at any given moment—the world simply changes too fast … it’s embarrassing to float up to a window, glance outside, and then have to ask a crewmate, “What continent is this?”
Traveling in space, she said, was a lesson in geopolitics:
I also became an instant believer in plate tectonics; India really is crashing into Asia, and Saudi Arabia and Egypt really are pulling apart, making the Red Sea wider … The Great Wall of China is not the only manmade object visible from space. [She saw] spiral eddies [in the oceans], wakes of large ships … The lights of cities sparkle … On one nighttime pass from Cuba to Nova Scotia the entire East Coast of the United States appeared in twinkling outline. Lightning … day to night and back again during a single orbit—
hurtling into darkness, then bursting into daylight … Part of the fascination with space travel is the element of the unknown—the conviction that it’s different from Earthbound experiences. And it is.
Years later, when Sally was walking down a New York sidewalk with Andrew Chaikin, a friend and fellow space buff, Chaikin pointed up to the blue sky, dotted that day with clouds. “I had decided in my head that that’s the way it might have looked when you looked at Earth from space,” he tells me. “And I turned to Sally and said, ‘What do you think? Is that what it looks like?’ ” Chaikin laughs at his own presumption. “She shook her head and said, ‘It’s so spectacularly different!’ ”
But the spectacle that most captured Sally’s attention was one that would shape the rest of her life’s work, the one she would mention every chance she got.
I remember the first time that I looked towards the horizon. I saw the blackness of space, and then the bright blue Earth. And then I noticed right along the horizon it looked as if someone had taken a royal blue crayon and just traced along Earth’s horizon. And then I realized that that blue line, that really thin royal blue line, was Earth’s atmosphere, and that was all there was of it. And it’s so clear from that perspective how fragile our existence is. It makes you appreciate how important it is to take care of that atmosphere.
She would occasionally change the metaphor: the atmosphere was Earth’s spacesuit; or it was “about as thick as the fuzz on a tennis ball.” So narrow, “a strong gust of interplanetary wind could blow it all away” … “it’s everything that separates us from the vacuum of space. If we didn’t have that atmosphere, we wouldn’t be here, and if we do anything to destroy that atmosphere, we won’t be here. So it really puts the planet in perspective.”
In time, that view would become her incentive, but for now, Sally was literally on a high. With the rest of her crew she helped grab President Reagan’s jellybeans out of the air; she tumbled around like a fish in a pond, usually wearing shorts and a TFNG tee-shirt, in stocking feet, in the shuttle’s pressurized environment. She strapped herself on to the treadmill and ran around the world, an exercise to stave off muscle loss. And she did it all to the sound of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, whose music she’d transferred to sixty-minute audio cassettes that she played on her Sony Walkman. Her tapes also included the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Jefferson Airplane, Lou Christie, the Eagles, Kenny Loggins, Janis Joplin and Jim Croce. Sally later lamented that with NASA’s three-cassette rule, she had only three hours of music. Digital players were more than a decade away.
Sally confirmed that the toilet’s new funnel system for women functioned smoothly. “It was a lot like sitting on a vacuum cleaner,” she later said. Unfortunately, the WCS mechanics broke down on the fifth day, so they all ended up using the toilet without suction, which was a primitive, but acceptable alternative. During liftoff, Sally also determined that the DACT, the women’s diaper, worked fine.
At night, she hooked her blue sleeping bag onto the middeck lockers, crawled in and slept comfortably, her arms floating up in front of her face, like a puppy on its hind legs. Sometimes she’d awaken after a few hours, and glide to a window, with music in her ears. There’d be plenty of time to sleep when she got home, she thought. The ebony sky stretched endlessly, with, she wrote, “Earth as a nightlight.”
HOMEWARD BOUND
The press maintained its love affair with Sally, breathlessly reporting every sighting from NASA’s cameras. And the agency passed another milestone when astronaut Mary Cleave served as CapCom. For the first time, a woman in space communicated with a woman on Earth. The moment was more memorable than their exchange.
Mary Cleave: It was nice workin’ with you last night.
SKR: See ya, Mary.
MC: Bye bye, Sally.
“To me that was a big deal, and to Sally, too,” Cleave tells me. “But we didn’t talk about it. We were probably the generation that just tried to fit in, not stick out.”
Challenger was supposed to return to KSC on Friday, June 24, the first of what NASA hoped would be regular landings in Florida. Valuable time (to prepare the next launch) and money could be saved by not having to ferry the spaceplane cross-country from California. So Joyce and Dale Ride, along with Bear and her family, had stayed put for the week, following the progress of the flight with increasing confidence. One day, while their daughter was in orbit some 200 miles high, they went to the beach and flew a kite. It was, says Bear, “a good description of how they raised us.”
But bad weather at the Cape forced Challenger to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The Rides joked that they could have stayed home since Encino was only about one hundred miles away. Instead, I offered them the chance to watch the landing from the privacy of the ABC News trailer, and asked if we might videotape their reactions. As a result, when the shuttle dropped out of the sky and Crippen steered it down the middle of the runway on the dry lake bed, we captured the exuberance: Dale pumping his fist in the air as his celebrated daughter came back to Earth, Joyce screaming and punching two fists, after which both Rides slid their hands across the sofa and held each other tight. “Hot dog!” Joyce finally exclaimed, tossing her hat in the air. “Do Presbyterians light candles? I’ll go light a candle.”
Sally emerged from Challenger in her light blue flight suit with a vivacious smile. As the crew walked the tarmac inspecting the shuttle, she and Fabian slid their arms around each other in the pure pleasure of the moment, and the 6′1″ Air Force pilot hugged the 5‘5½” astrophysicist with such energy, her feet left the ground. “When I see that videotape I smile to myself,” Fabian tells me. “Because I kind of half lifted her and that is not like me to do that! I think we were just so overjoyed at being back on the ground and having succeeded in what we were doing. And the machine looked so great, it really did. You always worry about damage to the machine and getting it ready to fly again. I think it is the sheer joy of mission completion.”
For Sally, it was simply sheer joy.
“The thing that I’ll remember most about the flight is that it was fun,” she said from the landing strip. “In fact, I’m sure it was the most fun I’ll ever have in my life.”
• • •
She’d done it. She’d done it without messing up. She’d done it so well, there was no room for doubt that any woman could do anything in space. But Sally would soon appreciate the insight from another astronaut after an even more momentous space flight fourteen years earlier. As Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins headed back to Earth from the Moon, astronaut Jim Lovell radioed up to them from Houston, “I just want to remind you that the most difficult part of your mission is going to be after recovery.”
6
*
REENTRY
JUNE 1983–JUNE 1985
Welcomed home by Mickey, Kennedy Space Center, July 1983.
Two weeks before he set foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong was asked whether he thought the magnitude of his mission, and the celebrity of being first, would affect his carefully guarded privacy. Armstrong did not. “I think a private life is possible within the context of such an achievement,” he said.
—July 5, 1969
WELCOME HOME!
Slicing through the atmosphere amidst an inferno of bright-hot molecules was the easy part. Sally’s return to Earth on June 24, 1983, had been cocooned by the shuttle and its heat-dissipating tiles, making the passage from space perilous but predictable. The only thing weighing Sally down now was gravity, as her body readjusted to the terrestrial environment. It felt like a dead weight. When she turned her head, the room spun; when she walked, she bumped into things. But less than an hour later, she was prancing along the tarmac with her usual bounce.
Reentering civilization was something else again.
“The moment we landed, that protective shield was gone,” Sally later explained in an oral history for NASA. “The transition from being inside this insulating bubble just before flight, then being in o
rbit—which is quite far removed from people and from the media and from just kind of the day-to-day world for a week—and then coming back down and almost being thrown to the wolves …” Translation: the wolves were the press. Sally’s year of training had screened out most of the ruckus before she flew. She had gently but firmly deflected invasions into her very private self with carefully calibrated or mission-specific responses, then escaped back to the simulator. She never saw the box of clippings that her mother collected; didn’t watch her own interviews on TV; declined to frame the magazine covers bearing her picture. Most would remain piled in cartons in her closet for decades, untouched, alongside the heaps of awards. But now she was center stage, NASA’s newest offering to a world hungry for heroes, coming face-to-face with the sort of public inquiry she had managed to avoid for thirty-two years. “[J]ust the sheer volume of it was something that was completely different for me,” she said, “and people reacted much differently to me after my flight than they did before my flight. Everybody wanted a piece of me.”
Ellen Baker watched it begin at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, where the crew was flown later that afternoon—still jaunty in their light blue flight suits—to reunite with families and friends. When Sally stepped off the plane, she and Steve hugged as warmly and excitedly as two kids at a prom. Baker also got a big hug. Normally, that would have been the end of it, because normally, just a few people showed up. No ropes, no ceremony. But Sally’s name had attracted a swarm of reporters and photographers, with headlines and deadlines to meet. “And you could see the look in Sally’s eyes at that instant. It was, ‘Oh my god, everything’s changed now.’ It was a really striking moment that I recognized and I think she recognized. It’s like, you’re not Sally anymore, you’re something else now.”