by Lynn Sherr
So good, that her legacy upended convention. Cady Coleman tells me about the day she took her four-year-old son, Jamey, to a reception at the Johnson Space Center. When they came upon a life-size cutout of an astronaut in a spacesuit, helmet on and visor down, Jamey asked, “Mommy, is that you?” Coleman told him no. “Well, if it’s not you,” Jamey said, “then whose mommy is it?”
It is a tribute to all the first women, not just Sally, that the question gets asked; it is a mark of society’s ability to adapt that the story gets an approving laugh. But it is a reminder of the never-changing times and an echo of Sally’s first flight, when every woman’s voice from a T-38 was assumed to be hers, that when she died, more than one TV news organization illustrated her life with footage of a female astronaut (presumably, Sally) tumbling around in the KC-135, practicing weightlessness. The aerobat was Anna Fisher.
Fisher, now sixty-five, is the only one of the original six still working at JSC (although not as an active astronaut), and I remind her about a comment she made when I interviewed her after the 1986 Challenger explosion and asked her thoughts about the death of Judy Resnik. “I’m really going to miss Judy,” she’d told me then. “I’m going to miss getting to have a reunion when we’re all eighty years old.” Still true, she says, lowering her eyes.
But while the six are now down to four, their spirit is as vital as the drive that got them there in the first place. Rhea Seddon, still blonde and still in the health care business, although no longer a practicing physician at sixty-five, is back in Tennessee. After three successful missions she tells me with gusto, “I love that my AARP card is sitting in my wallet next to my Victoria’s Secret card!”
LOST IN SPACE
In many ways, the arc of the shuttle paralleled that of Sally’s own professional life. She became known as the program began, and her flights soared as shuttlemania enveloped America. When the program shut down after the loss of Challenger, she left. And as the shuttle rose again (then fell, then returned successfully), she was there for the investigations, there as NASA’s conscience, always on call. And just as the shuttle always returned to Earth, so did Sally, directing her attention to this planet first. As often as she could, she helped reinvent NASA, putting cameras on its spacecraft and turning kids into virtual astronauts so that they could join in the fun. The last shuttle flight, STS-135, landed on July 21, 2011, just as Sally entered the last year of her own life. Like her, it sent out invaluable ripples from its own wave—not only the Hubble Space Telescope with its matchless lens on the universe, and the International Space Station, for which it delivered modules, but a world of intangibles.
“It taught the American space industry an awful lot of engineering lessons that I believe in the long run will pay dividends,” Kathy Sullivan, now acting administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, tells me. “We may sneer at all the ‘foolish jingoism’ of Apollo and that silly competition, but look at Canada, Europe, China, Japan, India, Russia. They rightfully seek to be spacefaring nations, bringing a cascade of benefits. Not the least of which is the confidence and pride and appetite for a bold future that it instills in all people. And that is not a small thing.”
All that in a machine that was far less sophisticated, by several orders of magnitude, than the smartphone you slip into your pocket; a machine that lasted thirty years.
Today the shuttle fleet has been dispersed to various museums around the country, relics of a different time. Enterprise, the prototype that Sally saw practicing test landings back in 1977, before she was chosen to be an astronaut, stopped traffic as it rode a barge up the Hudson River to New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Discovery went to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, Atlantis to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Endeavour, the fifth and final orbiter built, to Los Angeles. By chance, on the day after Sally’s tree-planting while I was at the Johnson Space Center, Endeavour made its last pass overhead, a bright white spaceplane bolted to the top of a 747. As hundreds of employees drifted out of their numbered buildings in the morning sun, the pilot circled wide and low, so that all could get a long last look at the vehicle riding piggyback. I saw tears, I saw salutes, I saw the wistful acceptance of decisions made elsewhere. Hail, Shuttle, and farewell. One longtime engineer, despondent that Endeavour was being flown to retirement in California, not back to Florida for a new launch, told me, “You don’t like to see it going West.”
Many believe NASA’s human spaceflight program has lost its direction on a wider scale, that the grit and guts that got us to the Moon have been dissolved by niggling bureaucracy. That Congress and the White House have abandoned a critical priority. “The amazing thing was, we accomplished it in eight years,” said moonwalker Charlie Duke at an event celebrating the last human lunar landing forty years earlier. “Today you wouldn’t even be able to write a proposal in eight years!” Apollo 7 veteran Walt Cunningham added, “We have converted ourselves to a risk-aversive society.” Gene Cernan calls theirs “the golden age of space,” and predicts humans will return to the Moon because “curiosity is the essence of human existence.” No doubt, but in a very different way. Soon, women and men with considerably fewer scientific or aeronautic credentials than the pioneers of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, or than Sally and her TFNG classmates, will pay commercial operators to fly them to the edge of space—tourists who are less fit but perhaps no less driven. Private industry will also help transport our next generations of astronauts, wherever they venture.
NASA had already changed by the time Sally flew, and it continued to evolve as she tried to help set a new course. Or courses. But she never gave up on the inspired minds that gave her the reverberating gift of knowledge. It’s what she told audiences in all those speeches across the country, where she inspired them to reach, as she had, for the stars, and beyond.
She did it again on February 7, 2011. Frances Hellman, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, had invited her to deliver the annual Regents Lecture, a prestigious Berkeley tradition. The auditorium was packed with university officials, students, members of the public and an unprecedented number of girls and young women. Sally, psyching herself for the moment, went over her notes ahead of time in the ladies’ room, propping her laptop on the sink to review the slides she had shown so many times before.
When Hellman introduced her, Sally bounded to the podium, her short brown hair gleaming, red jacket skimming her slim body over black pants. She delivered the speech with certainty, smoothly matching her comments to the images from the space shuttle, seamlessly pausing for the laughter, the applause, the gasps of wonder that she knew to expect. Her opening always set the tone:
When astronaut Jim Lovell of Apollo 13 fame was circling the Moon, he looked back at Earth and called our planet “a grand oasis in the great vastness of space.” That’s extremely unusual eloquence for an astronaut. You’re not going to hear any more of that today [Laughter].
Sally moved on to the story of her selection as an astronaut, the drama of launch (where you “go from a standing start to 17,500 miles an hour in eight and a half really fast minutes”), the joy of weightlessness. And with the help of photographs that had every tongue in the hall hanging out, she pointed out the entire north-south protrusion of Florida in one frame, the gradations of turquoise in its surrounding ocean, the “orange smudge” of Philadelphia’s lights at night, the royal blue line of the horizon, “where Earth ends and Space begins.” Then, after more travel snaps, she transitioned to the message that had shaped her post-NASA career. “Carl Sagan once said, ‘It’s suicidal to create a society that depends on science and technology in which no one knows anything about science and technology.’ And of course he’s right.” She cited the grim statistics about the current state of education: US students way below their peers overseas in math and science; high school and college graduation rates depressingly down. Middle school kids being taught physical sciences by teachers with no cre
dentials. “Maybe it’s not surprising that we’ve got a problem with science education.”
Then she made her pitch:
Our global competitiveness depends on the next generation of scientists and engineers. So it’s really important that we inspire the next generation of rocket scientists and environmental engineers. It’s also critical to prepare the core of the future skilled work force. That’s because in the next decade or so, fully 80 percent of the jobs in this country—and that includes just basic living wage jobs—are going to require some background in science, math or technology. So it’s really becoming an equity issue. If the kids in school today don’t get a good education in math and science, they’re not going to be competitive even for basic living wage jobs when they graduate.
That, she explained, was why she had cofounded Sally Ride Science: to keep girls from losing focus in middle school; to change the image of the Einstein lookalike to someone more like them; to teach kids that scientists don’t work alone in basements, but in groups. “Scientists don’t memorize the periodic table,” she pointed out. “They solve problems, they ask questions, they try to get at the answers, and they devise experiments to try to teach them things. Often they get results that they don’t expect, and they learn more when they get an answer that they did expect.”
She ended with her trademark plea:
“We need to make science cool again.”
OUT AND ABOUT
In May 2013, when Sally would have turned sixty-two, the LGBT employee group at the Johnson Space Center, called Out and Allied, released a nine-minute video called It Gets Better, in which gay and straight colleagues (including JSC director Ellen Ochoa) celebrate diversity. The project, part of a national outreach to high school– and college-aged individuals, was in the works long before Sally’s posthumous coming out, but Out and Allied chairman Steve Riley thinks her news helped their cause. “I think we’ve made tremendous strides,” he says, understating the transformation. He believes it’s only a matter of time before an openly gay astronaut will be at NASA.
Tam O’Shaughnessy is astounded and energized by the outpouring of support that resulted from her brief public confession. “I would give anything for Sally to know what I know,” she says, “the respect, the love for her, and for us. Dammit, the world changed, and I wish she could know what it feels like.” Tam is especially gratified by the more than two hundred condolence letters she received from public figures such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore, from lifelong tennis pals, from business associates, whose acknowledgment of their relationship marks another step of social acceptance. Senator Barbara Mikulski wrote of “the recent death of your dear partner … Sally could have used her fame in many ways, but she chose to use it to teach and inspire girls to study science. I know you played a big role in that.” Rick Hauck, the pilot on Sally’s history-making flight, said he hoped “that the memories of your shared life’s work and love will keep you smiling.”
At the Washington, DC, tribute (which Tam conceived and guided, and for which she raised the lion’s share of the funding), she stood before some two thousand people in the audience when she was announced as Sally’s life partner. Such a public acknowledgment would have been unthinkable a year earlier. “I am now the most relaxed inside than I’ve ever been,” she tells me. “I can breathe better; I can look people straight in the eye without blinking; I am free because I don’t have a secret anymore and because I no longer have to lie, which goes against my nature and beliefs. I owe that to Sally,” she adds, thanking the woman who, in death, gave her permission to be herself in life.
Tam has also found a new closeness with Joyce, who knows the unbearable grief of burying a daughter. “I guess had I known that Sally was going to leave prematurely, I’d have spent more time with her,” Joyce wrote to Tam. “I still howl occasionally, and shed a tear. Guess I did know for a year or so, but was in denial. You’re a fine substitute, and I mean that in the nicest sense.” She signed it, “Love from jr.”
Joyce is still petitioning to get women out of prison. She tells me, “I think the gay thing is very secondary to who Sally was.”
Bear says, “hugs are more common now” in the Ride family. And they have a new generation to practice on: In April 2013, Rowan Scott was born to Bear’s son, Whit, and his wife, Claire. Rowan is Sally’s first great-nephew. His dad was a toddler when he watched Aunt Sally’s launch at the Cape; at her tree planting ceremony in Houston, Whit shot the video tribute from the other women of NASA.
ASTRONAUT
As for me, I’m still composing questions that I’ll never get to ask, fully aware that the answers remain elusive. The dots don’t all connect in Sally Ride’s life. Still, in the course of writing this book I rediscovered my friend: at one level, the same funny, playful, smart, focused physicist-with-the-touch-of-a-poet I’d known for years. At another, the intensely private woman with the odd but loving childhood who had missed out on, or purposely avoided, sharing her feelings about so many things. I am sorry that I didn’t—still don’t—know exactly what she thought she had to protect. I ache that her efforts to make social change through science couldn’t always ease her own way. And that our society often makes it so difficult for people to be who they are. But the enduring love of family and close friends is a testament to her full and happy life.
In so many ways, her integrity is intact, as constant as the principles that guided her. The teamwork she learned on the tennis court took her to orbit and helped create a company; her commitment to science—what is, not what we want things to be—informed both her research and her NASA investigations, as well as her steadfast aversion to hogwash; her decision not to dwell on the past—to move on when things don’t work out—likely saved her a fortune in further psychotherapy bills. And her ability to recognize and grab hold of “your basic once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” made her own lifetime a legend. Sally didn’t invent the occasion of her celebrity, but she rose to meet it with uncommon dignity and passion, elevating her achievement to the impetus for a national agenda. She taught us that our home planet is as exotic as any distant point in the cosmos, that you can fly high without ever leaving Earth.
In 1987, in her first assessment of the future of NASA—that bold assignment for a thirty-five-year-old—Sally concluded the proposal for a lunar base this way: “This initiative,” she wrote, “would push back frontiers, not to achieve a blaze of glory, but to explore, to understand, to learn, and to develop …” Sally achieved her blaze of glory but never burned out. She moved on—to explore the possibilities, to understand the problems, to learn the best solutions and to develop the means to motivate new generations. Unwilling to be trapped in the symbolism of her feminist breakthrough, she invited everyone else to come along for the journey, to make our world livelier, more accessible, more exciting; to make its future more promising. Who was Sally Ride? A California girl who wanted to save the planet. An introvert whose radiant spirit pulled her into public service. An academic who could explain raindrops to college students and the wonders of weightlessness to a room full of little girls. Her optimism is also her legacy. She translated the dazzling reality that she saw from space into a beam of encouragement for the rest of us on Earth: “The stars don’t look bigger, but they do look brighter.”
• • •
Just before she got ill, Sally was asked if she wanted to fly in space again, the way John Glenn, at seventy-seven, had traveled on the shuttle’s ninety-fifth mission in 1998, making the astronaut and former senator the oldest human to go into orbit. “If they can fly an old man, they can fly an old woman,” Sally said, with a sly smile. At the time, she was fifty-nine. A few years earlier she had told me, “Yeah, I would go up in a second. But would I train for a year? No!” Sally was still setting her own rules. “I’d like to live my life and then give NASA a call.”
Flying in space was neither her childhood goal nor her adult commitment. But having done it twice, she cherished the adventure. Her life reminds us that whateve
r our own personal limits, there’s something out there grander than we can measure, more marvelous than we can imagine; something just waiting to be explored.
She felt the lure again on October 7, 2009, Astronomy Night at the White House, a star-gazing party for local youngsters attended by the entire Obama family on the South Lawn. More than a quarter century after she’d shot into space, Sally gamely donned her flight jacket and warmly answered questions from kids. One pressed the right button.
“What is your favorite planet?”
“Mars. It’s the planet I can imagine visiting one day, standing on, driving a rover around the surface, exploring its canyons, exploring its volcanoes, and then, most important, looking for evidence of past or current life. If there is life on a location other than Earth, Mars is a good candidate.”
She’d made the same exotic promise—or was it a challenge?—to youngsters across America over the years, passing the baton and leaning forward with a smile when she often said, “You and I will both see people set foot on Mars. The people in this room are just the right age to be the first to land. Who knows? It might be one of you. And that will be cool. That’ll be very cool.”
Once, she paused to dream. “Wish it would’ve been me.”
So do I.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first want to thank Tam O’Shaughnessy for wisely recognizing the need for this book and for sharing, without reservation, her memories about her life with Sally. Tam allowed me to roam freely through Sally’s personal and professional papers and objets, and she encouraged friends and colleagues to speak candidly about their own reminiscences. Talking about oneself and one’s love is never easy; doing it while mourning is unthinkable. Tam never hesitated to help, with essential and thoughtful details about so many moments to which only she was a witness. That is equally true for the entire family. I am very grateful to Bear Ride, whose childhood recollections, good humor and sensible counsel (along with stacks of youthful correspondence) provided invaluable insights about her big sister. Joyce Ride tolerated endless questions (to which she shares the same allergy as Sally) with the wit she bequeathed to both of her daughters. As the only member of the Ride family without a doctorate, Joyce remains, as Bear and Sally used to joke, the wisest of them all.