Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  In the end, she listed “four bold initiatives,” fulfilling her original vision, options to “restore the United States to a position of leadership.” That was the theme and the title: Leadership and America’s Future in Space. Everyone called it the “Ride Report.”

  Here, in unusually direct language, is the evolutionary approach she laid out for NASA:

  Send Humans to Mars: “Settling Mars should be our eventual goal,” Sally wrote, “but it should not be our next goal.” The Report outlined an orderly, unrushed expedition to establish a Martian base—not a “one-shot foray or a political stunt.” Sally cautioned against a “race to Mars” which would invariably lead to timetables. “Schedule pressures, as the Rogers Commission noted, can have a very real, adverse effect.”

  Build an outpost on the Moon: Return to the site of humankind’s greatest space adventure to construct a lunar station, to explore the resources of our nearest cosmic neighbor. This to counter the “considerable sentiment that Apollo was a dead-end venture, and we have little to show for it.”

  Explore the Solar System robotically: Sally was distressed by the slowdown in US planetary launches and particularly noted the growing presence of uncrewed Soviet spacecraft on Mars. Although it lacks “the excitement of human exploration, it is fundamental science that challenges our technology, extends our presence, and gives us a glimpse of other worlds.”

  Launch a Mission to Planet Earth: “Virtually everyone exposed to this initiative recognized its fundamental importance,” she wrote, “and agreed that ‘whatever we do, we have to do this …’ ” When’s the last time you saw language like that in an official government document? The report urged NASA to launch a series of satellites that would observe and record global change, and it emphasized the shared aspects of the project. Only by enlisting international cooperation—led by the US—could the planet be monitored, and secure.

  NASA should embrace Mission to Planet Earth. This initiative is responsive, time-critical, and shows a recognition of our responsibility to our home planet. Do we dare apply our capabilities to explore the mysteries of other worlds, and not also apply those capabilities to explore and understand the mysteries of our own world—mysteries which may have important implications for our future on this planet?

  Neither the concept nor the name was original: a group of NASA scientists had been promoting rigorous studies of the home planet for more than a decade, first sounding the alarm based on evidence from the hole in the ozone layer. To little avail. “NASA was an organization driven to explore, and Earth science wasn’t recognized as exploration,” explains Al Diaz. In most of the NASA hierarchy, observing micro-changes in Earth’s atmosphere was like watching paint dry; planetary missions were the sexy quests. And few wanted anything to derail the primacy of the astronauts. “To be in Earth science at NASA is to be treated as a stepchild,” says Dixon Butler, who was the lead advocate for the Mission Planet Earth initiative. “Our only job is to observe Earth from space, but that one essential mission … is a direct threat to everything else the agency does, because you can always say this is more important than human spaceflight, so you have to take a pause in human spaceflight.”

  Sally understood the implications. “She wanted to articulate it in a way that NASA could appreciate,” Al Diaz tells me. “And that was the ‘mission’ determination. Before that, Earth Science was seen as a kind of long-term operation that dealt with remote sensing and applications. But Sally became the Earth Science equivalent of Carl Sagan. She popularized it, made it something more tangible that people could relate to.”

  And she elevated Earth from our boring backyard to an exotic planet, a shrewd enticement for an agency that wanted to explore planets. Sometime later, Sally met with Senator Al Gore (who chaired the Space Science Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee) and Senator Barbara Mikulski (who was on the Senate Appropriations Committee) to review the report. They asked her what NASA could do most effectively. “Mission to Planet Earth,” Sally replied, invoking the mystery of an extraterrestrial adventure. The two senators asked why. “There is a deep suspicion in the scientific community,” Sally told them, “that there is intelligent life there.”

  • • •

  NASA wasn’t thrilled with Sally’s report. “ ‘It’s not exactly getting a warm embrace,’ one NASA manager said… . [S]enior officials initially debated whether the report should be released at all.” It was too blunt, too even-handed. And Sally had made Mission to Planet Earth seem more urgent than Mars, the administrator’s baby. Finally, NASA decided to print two thousand copies, a relatively small run for a yearlong job that had involved hundreds of employees.

  A week before the release, Sally invited Aviation Week’s Craig Covault in for an exclusive briefing—knowing he’d stick to the facts and not try to sneak in any personal questions. At the end of his backgrounder, Covault, who felt that administrator Fletcher was not rising to the challenge of the beleaguered NASA, asked Sally if she thought he should be fired. “She was still an active astronaut,” Covault says, pointing out the delicacy of the question about her boss. “So she hung her head down—I don’t think she wanted to make eye contact—and she said, ‘Yes.’ Just barely out of her mouth.”

  At 6:00 a.m. on an August morning, Terri Niehoff flew from Chicago to Washington with the first printing: fifty 63-page reports in a big, heavy box. When she got to Sally’s office, the two women hijacked a dolly and wheeled the cargo up to the Administrator’s office on the seventh floor of the old NASA building on Maryland Avenue. Sally went in alone. When she reappeared wearing a radiant smile, she signed Niehoff’s copy. “A success! … I promise to stop making changes now … special thanks for eliminating 90% of my semicolons!”

  DONE

  Sally didn’t want a news conference, didn’t do any more interviews. The report, she said, could speak for itself. The press reviews were glowing, applauding a commonsense, budget-conscious, clear-eyed plan of action. It presented, editorialized the Los Angeles Times, “a galaxy of space projects … [that could] restore the agency to its earlier professionalism.” Some noted the comments she slipped in at the end, calling for an increased emphasis on education in a broad range of science and technology. “This means capturing the imaginations and interests of young people at an early age in their educational careers,” she wrote, “and encouraging them to pursue studies that will prepare them to actively participate in the space program.”

  Her last assignment at Headquarters was brief—two months as acting Administrator of the Office of Exploration, a newly created position (recommended by her study) to help set up a coordinated, “serious focus” for everything related to human spaceflight.

  In August 1987, Sally Ride retired from NASA. She had announced her departure plans three months earlier, on her thirty-sixth birthday, the same month her divorce from Steve became final. NASA had to contend not only with the public surprise over her resignation, but with the consequences of her privacy. When the news of her divorce leaked out, a Houston reporter sent NASA a scathing letter, noting that the agency hadn’t mentioned it. And that, he said, was typical of how “astronaut biographies are often short of information.” NASA wrote back with an apology: they had just learned of the divorce themselves. Sally did no interviews on either subject.

  In the decade since she saw the article about NASA’s search for female astronauts, Sally Ride had flown to fame, flown again, helped investigate the space agency’s greatest disaster, and made bold suggestions for its future. To say that she was grateful for, and a proud former employee of, NASA would shortchange her passion for the job, the experience, the debt, and the concern she felt. NASA had put her not only into space, but on the nation’s front pages and in its history texts. Her flight would forever open doors and replenish her bank account. She was fiercely loyal to NASA, and it would always be part of her past, present and future; she was so eager to promote and protect the space agency, she might well have hidden her private life to help pre
serve its image. And perhaps even retired to spare them any embarrassment. “I think she knew,” Tam says, “that our relationship would be difficult if she stayed at NASA.”

  No experience could ever equal the rush of riding a rocket or floating weightless. But having reached the literal—if not professional—high point of her career four years earlier, at the very young age of thirty-two, Sally was ready to move on. Some of her TFNG classmates would stay for many more flights; Steve Hawley flew for the fifth and final time at age forty-seven, only retiring from NASA after thirty years.

  Not Sally. She packed up her apartment and headed to California, back to Stanford, the first step in her transition out of NASA. Having gone up into space and seen the future, she now turned her gaze downwards, towards Earth—just like all the other stars.

  9

  *

  DOWN TO EARTH

  SEPTEMBER 1987–SEPTEMBER 2000

  Earth view, English Channel, from STS 41-G, Challenger, October 1984.

  Gone from NASA, Sally embarked on the search for her next mission with renewed focus, redirecting every question about the ethereal toward the more substantive:

  TV Interviewer: Was it spiritual as you kissed the heavens?

  Sally Ride: You know, what was absolutely amazing to me was the feeling I had looking back at Earth … it’s remarkable how beautiful our planet is, and how fragile it looks.

  ARMS AND THE WOMAN

  Nowhere was the crusade to protect Earth taken more seriously than at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC, now the Center for International Security and Cooperation), the influential think tank where, in September 1987, Sally joined those trying to keep the world from blowing itself up.

  And nowhere did she feel more grounded than in an academic setting. “I love the university environment,” she said. “I love research, I love teaching. It’s what I planned to do before my career took a little bit of a turn with the astronaut corps. So going back to a university environment was a natural for me.”

  It was exactly the mood realignment she craved to contemplate her second act: a quiet sanctuary with open offices and hallway conversation where she could flex her brain, focus on something significant, and avoid having to talk about herself. More than one hundred requests for meetings or interviews languished in the Stanford publicity department. “We’re not NASA, and she’s no longer an astronaut,” explained a university spokesman. “She wants to be private.”

  Physicist and arms control expert Sid Drell, codirector of the center, had offered her the prestigious two-year science fellowship after being introduced by Sally’s Westlake classmate Brooke Shearer and her husband, Strobe Talbott, of Time magazine. “She was very serious, asked sharp questions and indicated that she had an interest in thinking about space and arms control,” Drell says. “She wanted a new challenge.”

  With the Cold War smoldering and the Berlin Wall still dividing East from West, the chance to study international security issues and help reduce the threat of nuclear weapons attracted some of the best minds in academia. Condoleezza Rice, then a Soviet specialist and an assistant professor at Stanford, was one of the first of her new colleagues Sally met, although Rice laughs about her clumsy initial encounter with the famous astronaut. “I thought to myself, ‘What am I going to say when I meet her?’ ” she tells me, recalling her nervousness. “And then I blurted out, ‘What’s it like to go into space?’ ” The two women hit it off instantly, sharing laughs over the chauvinistic measure of armament buildups (“mine’s bigger than yours” was the basic missile standard) and cheering on the Stanford (or any other) football team together. Their mutual passion for sports often found them watching games on TV—usually in Rice’s apartment at the low-rise Pearce-Mitchell Condo complex, because her TV set was larger. And while their politics would diverge, the woman who would become Secretary of State under President George W. Bush says that CISAC was “pretty moderate. We didn’t argue.”

  Sally’s research focused on verification of nuclear warheads: how to count and confirm the other side’s arsenal. Her degree in physics and her hundreds of hours in orbit were the perfect credentials to study rates of emissions and calculate radioactivity in outer space. Her experience dealing with real systems, like the shuttle, was even more valuable when she teamed up with two other physicist fellows to disprove the popular notion that nuclear warheads on sea-launched cruise missiles could not be monitored. They needed to understand the logistics, and the magic of Sally’s name opened up some usually impenetrable ports. “We went down inside the launcher on a destroyer, and we visited a factory where they assembled the cruise missiles,” recalls George Lewis, one of her co-researchers. The third partner, John Townsend, accompanied Sally “on a battleship that carried sea-launch cruise missiles, and then on two different attack submarines, where the commanders gave us a tour of the torpedo rooms where the missiles were deployed.” The paper they produced validated their premise, and they hoped it would influence US policy during negotiations with the Russians. But events overtook their ambitions. “The Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union became less of an issue,” Townsend says. The missile inspection issue faded without their contribution.

  Sally opposed any militarization of space. In 1985 she had told an audience at Mount Holyoke College, “I happen to be one of the people who think that space is not a good place for any weapons.” She was talking about President Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”) with its space-based system to intercept enemy missiles. When an administration official came to CISAC to brief the fellows in 1987, one of Sally’s colleagues watched with awe as she courteously “destroyed the speaker’s credibility with a couple of simple questions about the scale of the drawings and the imagined payload capacity of the rocket needed to put the various materials into space.” US rockets, she knew, had no such heavy lift capability.

  Some years later, delivering the Drell Lecture at Stanford, Sally included anti-satellite weapons in her list of no-no’s. They would, she said, be “disastrous,” in part because of the potentially deadly consequences of a piece of errant space debris hitting a functioning satellite. “What if anti-satellite testing proceeds and we start testing rockets that clobber satellites and explode them in space?” she asked in 2002. “What if enough of that goes on that there’s the equivalent to a test range up in low-Earth orbit?” Sound familiar? That is essentially the plotline of Gravity, the 2013 3D thriller where the characters played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney (along with their crew and shuttle) are clobbered by lethal chunks of orbiting satellite shrapnel and stranded in space. The white-knuckle sequences are relentless. But Gravity is fiction, more splash than science, digital magic from a movie studio. The real thing had put Sally and her crew at genuine risk three decades earlier, when a small pit appeared on one of Challenger’s windows during STS-7. “We didn’t know what it was. An awful lot of analysis was done while we were in orbit to make sure that the strength of the window would sustain reentry. It did. We were all fine.” Tests afterward identified the culprit as a small fleck of paint—from heaven-knows-what abandoned object—whipping around the planet so fast, it gouged a small dent in the window. “Well,” Sally explained, “a fleck of paint is not the same as a small piece of metal traveling at that same speed. So, as soon as you start increasing the amount of junk in a low-Earth orbit, you have an unintended byproduct that starts putting some of your own quite valuable satellites at possible risk.”

  Protecting Earth, she believed, also meant keeping an eye on the Russians after Glasnost. Her understanding of Soviet space capabilities had grown enormously since the night she’d swapped stories with Svetlana Savitskaya during their clandestine rendezvous in Budapest. Russian space officials had become more candid, and the newly available files indicated major progress in their cosmonaut program. In a 1989 article she coauthored for Scientific American, Sally weighed the impressive status and robust potential of the So
viet space program against the angst over US space policy. It was a barely disguised jab at the US to get its space act together. “Can the US manage its own, more sophisticated space technology well enough to mount an equally powerful program? Certainly it can, but not without the ingredients that characterize the Soviet program: long-range political and financial commitments that nurture long-range goals.” Imagine the thrill: the magazine that had so engrossed Sally as a youngster and provided her with puzzles to tease her brain, now bore her byline. Sally was starting to appreciate the upside of her celebrity. Which continued to be formidable.

  John Townsend, who made the cruise missile field trips with Sally, calls her “easily the most famous person I’ve ever worked with. In science, it wouldn’t be uncommon, when you were seated in a room, to have a bunch of Nobel laureates scattered around. No big deal. But when Sally was involved, it was different. At one meeting, when she wasn’t there, everyone was asking, ‘What’s Sally going to do? Where’s she going to get a job?’ ”

  Sally wondered the same thing. At the end of her two-year fellowship, Drell tried to get one of the Stanford departments to name her a professor. But no department would accept her. Stanford, her beloved alma mater, turned her down.

  “The stupidities and parochialism of what goes on in departmental faculty meetings—it’s as amazing as it is legendary,” Drell says. He resigned from CISAC in protest. “In the department’s view, she didn’t have the kind of published scientific literature which they said meant she’d be a great scientist. Stanford blinked.” Drell was furious. But Sally, he said, was “calm and cool. And other universities looked to Stanford and said, ‘You must be crazy.’ ”