Sally Ride, the first US woman to travel into space, has died aged 61, 17 months after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, her foundation says.


Sally Ride, dead at 61

“Sally’s historic flight into space captured the nation’s imagination and made her a household name,” Sally Ride Science said in a statement.

According to her foundation, Ride applied to NASA after seeing an ad in the Stanford student newspaper, calling for scientists and engineers, including women to apply to the astronaut corps. Once an aspiring tennis player, she went on to earn no fewer than four university degrees including a doctorate in physics.

She joined NASA in 1978 – one of 35 people selected as astronauts from a field of more than 8,000 who applied. She blasted off in the US space shuttle Challenger in June 1983.

Ride was not the first woman in space – that was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in June 1963. As part of that mission she used a robotic arm – which she had helped develop – to retrieve a satellite. While she was the first American woman in space, she was also – at the age of 32 – the youngest person in America at the time to go into orbit.

She reached orbit again the following year, and was scheduled for a third trip when the Challenger space shuttle broke apart during lift-off in 1986.

Following the disaster, she served as a member of the presidential commission that investigated the causes of the fatal accident. She also sat on a similar board following the Columbia space shuttle, which broke apart during its re-entry to Earth in 2003.

Since her first mission in 1983, more than 45 women from the US and other countries have flown in space, including two as shuttle commander.

After leaving NASA, Ride became a professor at University of California, San Diego, and served as a science fellow at Stanford University. She launched Sally Ride Science, which created science programmes and publications for young students, in 2001. She also wrote five children’s science books.

Ride died on Monday in La Jolla, California. She is survived by her mother Carol and her partner of 27 years Tam O’Shaughnessy.

Filed under: Manned Space Flight