Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Sally said it all came together a year later, when New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was chosen as Walter Mondale’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in the 1984 presidential election. The two women had met briefly beforehand, when Ferraro’s name was being mentioned as a serious candidate for the job. That June, Sally visited Ferraro’s congressional office and posed for photos with her staff. “None of them have ever asked for my autograph or to have their picture taken with me,” Ferraro joked, possibly truthfully. Sally gave her a tee-shirt bearing the vice-presidential insignia, and the photo of the two women holding the aspirational clothing made papers around the country.

  At the time, the notion of a female vice presidential candidate was as audacious as that of a woman flying into space had once been. But the lobbying was fierce and the time was right. And the straight-talking congresswoman from Queens was a natural new ally for Sally—her extrovert twin, almost a generation older but equal in her commitment to women’s rights.

  As the only reporter to cover both fulltime, I saw the connection firsthand; felt the electric charge from two women whose elevation to cultural icons filled a centuries-old void. Ferraro, like Sally, tapped into a deep yearning, one that crossed political lines. When she was nominated at the Democratic convention in San Francisco, her acceptance speech acknowledged the moment:

  Change is in the air, just as surely as when John Kennedy beckoned America to a new frontier; when Sally Ride rocketed into space …

  By choosing a woman to run for our nation’s second highest office, you sent a powerful signal to all Americans. There are no doors we cannot unlock. We will place no limits on achievement.

  If we can do this, we can do anything.

  “I was as moved by that as many women had been by my flight into space,” Sally said. “For the first time, I understood why it was such an emotional experience for so many people, to see me accomplish what I had, as a woman.”

  On Ferraro’s campaign trail, thousands of Republican and Democratic women alike, and plenty of men, too, felt the same way, showing up at rallies with their daughters, the tiniest of whom they boosted above the crowd so they could see what a female candidate at the top of the ticket looked like. Most wouldn’t vote for her—elections were about politics not gender—but the possibility she represented was intoxicating.

  In a 1984 poll of college-educated women asking them to name their favorite role model, Ferraro came in first, with Sally and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor tied for second. At a private lunch, Sally told the vice presidential candidate, “I don’t mind being second to you.” Earlier Sally had said, “There always has to be a first. And once that happens, society changes.”

  BACK TO WORK

  On August 30, 1984, STS-41D launched, carrying a crew of six, including Steve Hawley. It was the fourth try for Discovery, which had been delayed for more than two months. Sally watched with her in-laws at the Kennedy Space Center. “A launch is always a spectacular experience,” she said afterwards. “It’s obviously a special feeling, though, when your husband is going up.” Also on board was Judy Resnik, about whom Sally said, “I’ll be glad when there are two of us, so she can take some of the publicity.” Judy shared Sally’s belief that her personal life was none of the public’s business, and Sally had often wandered into Judy’s office and collapsed on a chair to bemoan the latest demands on her time.

  The mission started off smoothly, but five days later, when a buildup of ice outside one of Discovery’s waste ports threatened to come loose and smash into the tail on entry, Sally was in the simulator trying to help other astronauts figure out how to position the robot arm to knock it off. She worked through the night, plotting a complex procedure to reach the arm around to a blind spot and dislodge the chunk. The plan was radioed up to the crew; it worked. Steve was spared a spacewalk, and Discovery came home safely.

  Sally’s de-icing scheme had interrupted her own training. A year earlier, in the midst of her publicity tour, NASA had assigned her to another mission, designated STS-41G, bringing Sally back into the system and giving her acceptable cover to turn down anything she didn’t like.

  It was more than just cover. Once again, Bob Crippen was assigned to be her commander, but he was in the midst of training for yet another flight that would launch earlier. “They wanted to see how fast we could turn crews around,” Crippen explains. “So I told George [Abbey], ‘The only way I could do that is if Sally is on my crew.’ I said, ‘Put Sally on [41G] again as my flight engineer and she can sit in for me. She knows how I like to do business.” So for six months, as Crip’s “pseudo-commander,” she sat in the left-hand seat during ascent and entry simulations, taking the rookies through the paces. For Dave Leestma, a Navy test pilot serving as a mission specialist, Sally was a perfect surrogate. “She knew how Crip would react to situations,” he tells me. Once during an ascent simulation, Leestma was changing some settings on a caution warning system, “and I was reconfiguring as fast as I could, and Sally said, ‘Slow down, you’ll make a mistake. You don’t have to go that fast, just make sure you’re right.’ Sure enough, we get on orbit, there are two pints of adrenaline in my system, and I’m doing the same thing. And Crip leans over and says, ‘Slow down, Dave!’ ”

  The pilot was Jon McBride, the Navy aviator who’d helped teach Sally to fly a T-38. Another mission specialist was Kathy Sullivan. STS-41G would be the first flight carrying two women, and they joined forces to take advantage of the frequent (and thoughtless) mix-ups by some reporters, often introducing themselves as “the other one.” But sharing the shuttle with Sally, who was still a boldfaced name, slightly dimmed the spotlight, even before they launched. Sullivan got back by wearing a name tag reading, “Sally” with a bar over it—in other words, “NOT Sally.” “I recall rather a scowl on her face, but I thought it was fun,” Sullivan says.

  Sullivan would also do an Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA), or spacewalk, but lost the title of first female in the world to do so when Svetlana Savitskaya, Sally’s new pal, flew again and did a spacewalk in July. Svetlana also deprived Sally of becoming the first woman to fly in space twice. The battle over titles was irrelevant to the astronauts. For Kathy, being the first American female spacewalker was just fine—in fact, “for me, my first spacewalk (any spacewalk, for that matter) was just fine,” Sullivan tells me.

  On launch day, October 5, 1984, it was Sally who pushed Sullivan to the front of the line and in full view of photographers as the crew exited the building to head toward the pad.

  The flight lasted nine days with a crew of seven, the largest yet. Experience, it turned out, counted. When they reached orbit, Sally “got graceful very fast,” according to Leestma, who felt the initial clumsiness of a rookie. And when a number of mechanical glitches threatened various tasks, Sally’s on-the-job savvy helped save the day. First, the solar panels on an Earth-observing satellite failed to extend properly, despite attempts from both the shuttle and ground controllers. Sally and Leestma, frustrated by the lack of response to the checklist, turned to their own ingenuity. Here is how high-tech problems get solved in outer space:

  “Let’s shake it,” Leestma suggested to Sally. She turned to the commander. “Crip, do you mind if we try?” When he said, “I trust you, Sally, just don’t break it!” they got to work. With the satellite, a cumbersome albeit weightless boxcar, dangling from the end of the robot arm, Leestma configured the computer as Sally maneuvered the joystick and the dials, at much higher rates than they’d ever trained for. Some combination of aerodynamic pressure, the heat of the sun and chutzpah made it work—by chance, as they were flying over California. Problem solved.

  Sally also repaired a broken antenna after pulling out all the lockers on the middeck area and threading her way through a jungle of wires. The inflight mechanic had again earned her keep.

  Afterward, it was more of the same.

  “It’s like you’re not even in the room when you’re around her,” Leestma says,
of postflight crew events. “Everyone is just focused on her! You could just see the stars in people’s eyes—especially college age and younger women—people actually had a hero they could look up to, for things other than sports or politics or whatever. Somebody who had accomplished something because of her education and her competence.”

  Like everyone else, the crew protected her. “People would say, ‘Are you Sally Ride?’ And we’d say, ‘Nope. Looks like her, but isn’t.’ ”

  One day Sally wanted to buy a new car, something sporty and fun. Leestma, a car buff, took her to buy a bright red Pontiac Fiero, a low, boxy wedge. When she wrote out the check the salesman said, “Are you … ?” Sometimes, she couldn’t hide.

  • • •

  With two successful flights, Sally got back in line. Sort of. Her celebrity meant she would never be one of the gang, and some of her colleagues found her behavior “distant.” Despite repeated public statements of loyalty—“I’m intending to stay with NASA as long as they’ll let me stay”—her thoughts were starting to wander.

  Still, she was there for NASA when they needed her. And true to her principles. In April 1985, yet another on-orbit repair session required astronaut Rhea Seddon to help gin up a device to try to reach a balky switch on a satellite in the payload bay. With advice from Mission Control, Seddon dug up a needle and thread and stitched the plastic cover of a briefing book to a long handle to make what became known as the flyswatter. CapCom Dave Hilmers radioed up his congratulations. “Those two look super,” he said, adding, “tribute to a fine seamstress.” Later, when Sally arrived at Mission Control, she radioed up to Seddon that she’d corrected Hilmers’s intended compliment “and told him, ‘That was a surgeon.’ ” All in good fun, but it was working. When Seddon thanked a different CapCom for a clutch of teleprinter messages he’d sent up to Discovery, he responded, “Just think of it as a daily run by the mailman, excuse me, mailperson, mailperson.”

  In June 1985, Shannon Lucid launched on STS-51G. All six of the original women had now flown. That same day, NASA announced that Sally would be a member of her third mission, scheduled to fly in July 1986.

  Later that month, Sally went to Atlanta to help open the convention of the National Women’s Political Caucus, an activist group of progressive women from both parties (to whom Sally had once written a $75 check). Gerry Ferraro, who had gotten shellacked, along with Walter Mondale, in the ’84 election, was greeted with a thunderous ovation from the nearly two thousand feminists of both parties attending the meeting. Their feisty resolve was evident in one of the most popular buttons on sale: “We Haven’t Come That Far and Don’t Call Me Baby.” Ferraro pointed out that with only two female governors and two women in the US Senate, “The battle is far from won.” Sally told the audience that science was doing no better than government. Girls, she said, were discouraged from studying science and math in school, and young women faced barriers entering careers in the field. “That’s something we have to work hard to overcome.”

  If you listened closely, you could hear the rustle of wings being unfurled.

  7

  *

  EXPLOSIONS

  SPRING/SUMMER 1985–SUMMER 1986

  Tam, Atlanta, 1985.

  Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life.

  —Gabriel García Márquez

  TAM

  “I was in shock that I was in love with Sally, and that Sally was in love with me. I couldn’t believe it. It was just like, What?”

  Tam O’Shaughnessy had first met Sally on the junior tennis circuit, when they were both preteens in the close-knit community of gifted kids and ambitious, carpooling parents. Tam’s mom and Sally’s dad became pals while toting their kids to the tournaments; Tam and Sally melded with a group of Southern California regulars whose friendship endures today. And while Sally was nearly a year older, Tam—a “tall, elegant pixie,” according to one friend, with “beautiful, wide open eyes,” a turned-up nose and high cheekbones, crowned by short brown hair—was by far the bigger star.

  “Sally was good, but not the best in the pack,” Tam says, matter-of-factly. “We only played one time. I won.” Tam had grown up hitting with, among others, Stan Smith, who would be ranked number one in the world in 1972. Her childhood coach was Billie Jean King, whose brother, Randy Moffitt, was later Tam’s first serious beau as a teen. Tam and her doubles partner, Ann Lebedeff (now professor and Head Women’s Tennis coach at Pomona-Pitzer Colleges), were among the top-ranked junior teams in the country; in 1969 they were ranked number 3 in women’s doubles nationally (Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals were number 1). As the game got tougher and she joined the fledgling Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) pro tour, founded by King, Tam was ranked as high as number 52 in women’s singles in the world. She played Wimbledon once and the US Open twice.

  She was a serious contender despite the “pressure to not be jocks” that Tam saw applied to all the junior girls. One evening in 1970, at dinner with two of the top male players, the men encouraged her (she was eighteen) to quit the game. “They told me that my calf muscles were pretty large and muscular,” Tam tells me, “and that continuing to compete in tennis, and work out, would only make them larger. They said that I was such a nice and attractive girl, they would hate to see me change.”

  Tam stuck with tennis for four more years, leaving the circuit at twenty-two to work with Billie Jean and Larry King at their company, King Enterprises, in San Mateo, where she was founding publisher of the first WTA Newsletter among other publications. By then she knew she was gay. She reconnected with Sally at nearby Stanford—while Sally was getting her master’s and doctoral degrees and working at Sportswoman, a small rival to the Kings’ womenSports—where they competed in platform tennis tournaments together and covered some tennis events for their respective publications. On one trip to a WTA tournament in Palm Springs, Tam and Sally wound up playing a spur-of-the-moment set against commentator Bud Collins and sportswriter Barry Lorge. “It was a disaster,” Tam recalls. “Bud played barefoot and Barry stood at the net. Sally and I played like ducks out of water. We hadn’t played tennis for many months and we couldn’t get a ball in the court.” The guys (“mediocre club players,” Tam says dismissively) “beat us!” Collins, recounting the incident in his own imaginative style, calls his team “a couple of hacks” and takes tongue-in-cheek credit for driving Sally away from tennis and launching her astronaut career.

  Off the court, Tam and Sally occasionally met for dinner, including one evening when Tam served steak and wine in her apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. Sally would later tell Tam that her feelings for her old friend started to change that night, but at the time they were just pals, with the kind of long history Sally cherished. Tam was among the girlhood tennis buddies cheering on Sally’s STS-7 launch in Florida.

  In 1985, Tam was living in Atlanta, teaching eighth-grade biology. About six months earlier, she had broken up with another woman after a long, serious romance. One day Sally—who had seen Tam nearly half a dozen times on some post-STS-7 speaking trips to Atlanta over the past year or so—called to say she’d be back in town on business. They went out to dinner, then back to Tam’s place to talk.

  “Sally and I talked about this many times,” Tam tells me, reaching for the details, “and we couldn’t remember exactly what happened. I think it’s sort of typical when people start feeling something romantic for each other. There’s one moment when you realize that you feel different than you thought you did. And I remember we were sitting on the couch, and I leaned over to pet my dog, Annie, when out of the blue, Sally put her hand on my back. And I just felt different. And Sally did too.”

  “We are in trouble,” Tam told her.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Sally said.

  But they did. “I saw the look in her eyes,” Tam says now. “She was in love with me, and I realized in that instant that I was in love with her, too. It was amazing. And we were absolutely
stunned.”

  How, Tam thought, could she have those feelings for Sally, who’d been her friend since she was a kid?

  Tam’s family—two “wonderful but wacky parents”—shared the same middle-class values and beliefs as Sally’s mom and dad, minus the constancy of Dale Ride. Her father was “a free spirit who should not have had children.” When he split, leaving behind Tam, thirteen, and her two sisters, her mom was the “hardworking, responsible, loving single parent. I was the one in the family who took care of everyone.” The despair she saw in her mother, plus her sorrow over her father’s departure, left Tam overwhelmed. She withdrew from the world, didn’t graduate from high school because of her grade in one course. But she bounced back quickly, and after her tennis career and publishing success, made up the credits and earned her BS in biology, the field of her dreams, at thirty-one—the year Sally first flew.

  Tennis saved Tam at first (“I loved whacking the ball”), along with the more stable households of families like the Moffitts (Billie Jean and Randy’s parents). Hanging out with the other kids on the circuit gave her some of the grounding she’d missed. Years later, Sally supplied a similar solid base. “She gave me the stability I longed for but never had growing up,” Tam says. What Sally got from her, Tam says, was “the emotional outlet she yearned for but never learned how to express. Sally couldn’t verbalize her emotions, couldn’t talk about why she felt the way she felt. We completed each other.”

  “Sally saw in Tam someone who could be incredibly nurturing and kind and loving,” says Kay Loveland, another former tennis pal who was then practicing psychology in Atlanta. She was one of the few who spent time with them as a couple almost immediately after they got together. “When Tam loves, there are no holds barred. And I bet that felt so good to Sally.”