Салли Райд: Америкалық ғарышкер және физик

American physicist and astronaut (1951–2012)

Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman and the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. She was the youngest American astronaut to have flown in space, having done so at the age of 32. Ride was a graduate of Stanford University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1973, a Master of Science degree in 1975, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1978 (both in physics) for research on the interaction of X rays with the interstellar medium. She was selected as a mission specialist astronaut with NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first class of NASA astronauts to include women. After completing her training in 1979, she served as the ground based capsule communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights, and helped develop the Space Shuttle's robotic arm. In June 1983, she flew in space on the on the STS 7 mission. The mission deployed two communications satellites and the first Shuttle pallet satellite (SPAS 1). Ride operated the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve SPAS 1. Her second space flight was the STS 41 G mission in 1984, also on board Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. She left NASA in 1987. Ride worked for two years at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the loss of Challenger and of Columbia, the only person to participate in both. Having been married to astronaut Steven Hawley during her spaceflight years and in a private, long term relationship with former Women's Tennis Association player Tam O'Shaughnessy, she is the first astronaut known to have been LGBT. She died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, the elder child of Dale Burdell Ride and Carol Joyce Ride Both parents were elders in the Presbyterian Church. Her mother, who was of Norwegian descent, had worked as a volunteer counselor at a women's correctional facility. Her father served with the U. S. Army in Europe with the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II. After the war he went to Haverford College on the G. I. Bill, earned a master's degree in education at the University of California, Los Angeles, By 1963 Ride was ranked number 20 in Southern California for girls aged 12 and under. She graduated in June 1968, and then took a class in advanced math at Santa Monica College during the summer break. Astrophysics and free electron lasers were her areas of study. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on "the interaction of X rays with the interstellar medium", under the supervision of Arthur B. C. Walker Jr.

At Stanford, Ride renewed her acquaintance with Molly Tyson, who was a year younger than her. The two had met on the tennis circuit as junior tennis players. Although Ride was rated number one at Stanford and Tyson was number six, the two played doubles together. Ride later quit the Stanford tennis team in protest against the university's refusal to join the Pac 8 Conference in women's tennis. She was the only woman among the twenty applicants in the sixth group, all applicants for mission specialist positions, who reported to NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, on October 3, for a week of interviews and medical examinations. Her physical fitness impressed the doctors. They also placed her in a Personal Rescue Enclosure to see if she suffered from claustrophobia. She was asked to write a one page essay on why she wanted to become an astronaut. Finally, she was interviewed by the selection committee. Officially, they were astronaut candidates; they would not become fully fledged astronauts until they had completed their training. Ride was graded a civil service GS 12, with a salary of US$21,883 (21883.0 in 1978 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years). She bought a unit in the Nassau Bay, Texas, area, and moved in with Colson, who secured a research grant at Rice University so they could move to Houston together. He became the only unmarried astronaut candidate's partner. In 1981, Ride began dating Steven Hawley, another one of the TFNGs. They moved in together, and considered themselves engaged. Unlike Colson, he was not aware of her earlier relationship with Tyson. She was the first woman to serve as a CapCom. By early 1982, George Abbey and the Chief of the Astronaut Office, John Young, wanted to begin scheduling missions with the TFNGs, starting with the seventh Space Shuttle mission. To command it, they chose Robert Crippen, who had flown with Young on the first Space Shuttle mission. They wanted a woman to fly on the mission, and since the mission involved the use of the RMS, the choice narrowed to Ride, Judy Resnik and Anna Fisher, who had specialized on it. Factors in Ride's favor included her agreeable personality and ability to work with others, her performance as CapCom, and her skill with the robot arm. However, JSC director Chris Kraft preferred Fisher, and Abbey had to defend their decision. NASA Headquarters ultimately approved Ride's selection, which was officially announced in April 1982. As the first American woman to fly in space, Ride was subjected to media attention. There were over five hundred requests for private interviews, all of which were declined. Instead, NASA hosted the usual pre launch press conference on May 24, 1983. When the lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on June 18, 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly in space, and the third woman overall. Many of the people attending the launch wore T shirts bearing the words "Ride, Sally Ride", lyrics from Wilson Pickett's song "Mustang Sally". The mission also carried the first Shuttle pallet satellite (SPAS 1), which carried ten experiments to study formation of metal alloys in microgravity. Part of Ride's job was to operate the robot arm to deploy and later retrieve SPAS 1, which was brought back to Earth. The orbiter's small Reaction control system rockets were fired while SPAS 1 was held by the remote manipulator system to test the movement on an extended arm. The mission also studied Space adaptation syndrome, a bout of nausea frequently experienced by astronauts during the early phase of a space flight.

Ride was soon back in the rotation, training for her third flight, STS 61 I. This mission was scheduled to be flown no later than July 15, 1986, and was to deploy the Intelsat VI 1 and INSAT 1 C communications satellites and carry the Materials Science Lab 4. The crew was subsequently switched to STS 61 M, a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TRDS) deployment mission scheduled to be flown in July 1986. She also served on two more missions as CapCom. On January 7, 1986, Ride provided a glowing reference for her friend (and eventual biographer) Lynn Sherr for NASA's Journalist in Space Project. Sherr became one of the finalists. This could be agonizing for a couple whose marriage was breaking up. According to Roger Boisjoly, who was one of the engineers that warned of the technical problems that led to the Challenger disaster, after the entire workforce of Morton Thiokol shunned him, Ride was the only public figure to show support for him when he went public with his pre disaster warnings. Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for his efforts. The Rogers Commission submitted its report on June 6, 1986. She divorced Hawley in June. At Stanford, her colleagues included Condoleezza Rice, a specialist on the Soviet Union. Ride researched means by which nuclear warheads could be counted and verified from space, but the impending end of the Cold War made this a much less pressing issue. As the end of her fellowship approached, Ride hoped to secure a permanent position at Stanford. Sidney Drell, who had recruited her, attempted to get a department to appoint her as a professor, but none would. Drell resigned from CISAC in protest. Her research primarily involved the study of nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She remained director of Cal Space until 1996. She retired from UCSD in 2007 and became a professor emeritus. From the mid 1990s until her death, Ride led two public outreach programs for NASA—the ISS EarthKAM and GRAIL MoonKAM projects, in cooperation with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UCSD. The programs allowed middle school students to request images of the Earth and the Moon. Ride bought a house in La Jolla, California, and O'Shaughnessy moved in after taking up a teaching position at San Diego Mesa College. Sally Ride Science created entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls. Ride and O'Shaughnessy co wrote six books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science. In 2003, Ride served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and was the only person to serve on both the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster and the one that investigated the Columbia disaster. She endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008, and was contacted by Lori Garver, the head of Barack Obama's transition team for NASA in 2008, but once again made it clear that she was not interested in the post of NASA administrator. She served on the board of the National Math and Science Initiative in 2007 and the Educate to Innovate initiative in 2009, and was a member of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, which conducted an independent review of American space policy requested by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on May 7, 2009.

When Ride delivered a speech at the National Science Teachers Association Conference in San Francisco on March 10, 2011, O'Shaughnessy and a friend noted that she looked ill. Alarmed, O'Shaughnessy had her book a doctor's appointment for the following day. A medical ultrasound revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in her abdomen. A follow up CT scan at UCSD confirmed a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation therapy to reduce the size of the tumor. Ride had ensured that O'Shaughnessy would inherit her estate when she drew up her will in 1992. They registered their domestic partnership on August 15, 2011. On October 27, surgeons removed part of Ride's pancreas, bile duct, stomach and intestine, along with her gallbladder. Following cremation, her ashes were interred next to those of her father at Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery, Santa Monica. Her papers are in the National Air and Space Museum Archives of the Smithsonian Institution. This made Ride the first known LGBT astronaut. The relationship was confirmed by Ride's sister Bear, who said Ride chose to keep her personal life private, including her sickness and treatments.

Ride received numerous awards throughout her lifetime and after. She received the National Space Society's von Braun Award, the Lindbergh Eagle by the Charles A. Lindbergh Fund, and the NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Award. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame and was awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal twice. Elementary schools in the United States were named after her, including Sally Ride Elementary School in The Woodlands, Texas, and Sally Ride Elementary School in Germantown, Maryland. In 1984, she received the Samuel S. Beard Award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Ride into the California Hall of Fame at the California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts on December 6, 2006. The following year she was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio. Ride directed public outreach and educational programs for NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, which sent twin satellites to map the moon's gravity. On December 17, 2012, the two GRAIL probes, Ebb and Flow, were directed to complete their mission by crashing on an unnamed lunar mountain near the crater Goldschmidt. NASA announced that it was naming the landing site in her honor. Also in December 2012, the Space Foundation bestowed upon Ride its highest honor, the General James E. Hill Lifetime Space Achievement Award. In April 2013, the United States Navy announced that a research ship would be named in honor of Ride. The RV Sally Ride was christened by O'Shaughnessy on August 9, 2014, and delivered to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2016. It was the first vessel in the research fleet to be named after a female scientist. A "National Tribute to Sally Ride" was held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D. C., on May 20, 2013. That day, President Barack Obama announced that Ride would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. The medal was presented to O'Shaughnessy in a ceremony at the White House on November 20, 2013. In July 2013, Flying magazine ranked Ride at number 50 on their list of the "51 Heroes of Aviation". For their first match of March 2019, the women of the United States women's national soccer team each wore a jersey with the name of a woman they were honoring on the back; Tierna Davidson chose the name of Sally Ride. Ride was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display in Chicago that celebrates LGBT history and people, in 2014. She was honored with a Google Doodle on what would have been her 64th birthday in 2015. It was reused on International Women's Day in 2017. Stanford University's Serra House located in Lucie Stern Hall was renamed the Sally Ride House in 2019. The U. S. Postal Service issued a first class postage stamp honoring her in 2018, and Ride appeared as one of the first two honorees of the American Women quarters series in March 2022. She was the first known LGBT person to appear on U. S. currency. On 1 April 2022, a satellite named after Ride (ÑuSat 27 or "Sally", COSPAR 2022 033R) was launched into space as part of the Satellogic Aleph 1 constellation. The Cygnus spacecraft used for the NG 18 mission was named the S. S. Sally Ride in her honor. It launched successfully on November 7, 2022. In 2022 a statue of Ride was unveiled outside the Cradle of Aviation Museum. In 2023 another statue of Ride was unveiled; this one is outside the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Billy Joel's 1989 song "We Didn't Start the Fire" mentions her. Ride appeared as herself in the 1999 Touched by an Angel episode "Godspeed". Astronauts Chris Hadfield and Catherine Coleman performed a song called "Ride On". The song was later released as part of Hadfield's album Space Sessions: Songs from a Tin Can under the name "Ride That Lightning." A 2017 "Women of NASA" Lego set featured mini figurines of Ride, Margaret Hamilton, Mae Jemison, and Nancy Roman. In 2019, Mattel released a Barbie doll in Ride's likeness as part of their "Inspiring Women" series. On October 21, 2019, the play Dr. Ride's American Beach House by playwright Liza Birkenmeier premiered off Broadway at Ars Nova's Greenwich House Theater in New York City. The play is set the evening before Ride’s 1983 space flight, and is about women's desires and American norms of sex and power, lensed with Ride's experience as an astronaut in relation to her LGBTQ identity. The title of the play alludes to NASA's astronaut beach house where astronauts were quarantined before missions. In the film Valley Girl (2020), Ride is referred to not only as the first woman astronaut, but also as a valley girl, since she was from Encino. In 2021, Ride was featured in the second season of the Apple TV+ streaming series For All Mankind, where she was played by Ellen Wroe.