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Sally Ride
(26 May 1951 - 23 Jul 2012)
American astronaut.
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Science Quotes by Sally Ride (8 quotes)
[In junior high school] I liked math—that was my favorite subject—and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
[In space] the stars don’t look bigger, but they do look brighter.
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
[Lifting off into space] I wasn’t really scared. I was very excited, and I was very anxious. When you’re getting ready to launch into space, you’re sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen. So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion—because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
I didn’t really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college. But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program. I had both male and female heroes. One was a high school science teacher who was very important in encouraging me to pursue science. Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine. And the early astronauts, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, were heroes of mine as well.
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
I think that the two things that almost any astronaut would describe [as most fun about being in space] are the weightlessness and the view of Earth. Weightlessness is just a lot of fun!
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
I think there probably is life, maybe primitive life, in outer space. There might be very primitive life in our solar system—single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won’t know about that for a long time.
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis. So I decided on science when I was in college.
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
There are now several women astronauts who have a test pilot background, and that was not true for a long time. For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds. So it would’ve been impossible to have an all-women crew because there weren’t women pilots. But now it would be very possible!
— Sally Ride
Interview conducted on Scholastic website (20 Nov 1998).
Quotes by others about Sally Ride (1)
When I was … a teenager … like, 14, … the space program was getting started, and I wanted to be an astronaut. I wrote to NASA and I said, “What do I have to do to be prepared to be an astronaut?” And they wrote back and said, “Thank you very much but we’re not taking girls.” … That thankfully changed with Sally Ride and a lot of the other great women astronauts.
At Town Hall Meeting, Dover, New Hampshire (16 Jul 2015). As quoted in Clare Foran, 'Hillary Clinton: I Wanted to Be an Astronaut', National Journal (16 Jul 2015).
See also:
- 26 May - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Ride's birth.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
