Sally Ride Takes Her Final Flight 251
fructose writes "Sally Ride, America's first woman in space died today at age 61. She succumbed to pancreatic cancer according to her office in San Diego. Here's to wishing her a safe trip on her final journey."
Re:Safe trip? (Score:5, Informative)
People do not want to admit that death==nonexistence so they make-up imaginary "trips" to some other place (heaven, hell, Elysian Fields, space, whatever). In reality Sally Ride's personality dissolved into nothingness at the moment her brain's neurons broke connection with one another when they were deprived of oxygen.
Sally Ride was a Lesbian (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sally Ride was a Lesbian (Score:5, Informative)
Except she wasn't (publicly) a lesbian when she rode the shuttle. She was married to Steve Hawley (another astronaut). They married in 1982, she got her seat on the shuttle in 1983. She got together again with Tam O'Shaughnessy in 1985 (they were childhood friends), and she divorced Hawley in 1987. I would suspect that the marriage to Steve Hawley was more a political move (on her part, at least) to dispel any question within NASA about her sexuality and secure her position as the first American woman in space. Had she been an admitted lesbian in 1983, I seriously doubt she would have gotten her shot to go into space. The fact that she left NASA the same year she divorced Hawley lends credence to the possibility that the revelation of her sexuality (at least, internally within the organization) ended her space career.
Re:She's dead. (Score:4, Informative)
It's a metaphor son.
Sally at JPL, circa 1985 (Score:3, Informative)
I met Sally (briefly) at JPL, after her 1984 Challenger mission. My impression was of someone who was confident, supremely able, and didn't worry a lot how she dressed. I got this impression since she showed up at the lab wearing shorts, and seemed instantly at home, like she'd been working there for years. Her later partnership with Tam was a surprise, since she gave no hint of that during her astronaut years. But yes, getting a ride on the big machine in the early 80's was a very political game, as much about appearances as it was about ability. And ability she had in spades. During the October 84 Challenger mission, all kinds of shit went wrong. An RF antenna cable on the radar overloaded and started arcing, causing the SNR to radically drop. The monitoring equipment at Johnson acted up, showing loss of TDRS downlink data when it was actually fine. I also seem to recall that Sally had to take apart parts of the shuttle with a wrench to get access to the data recorder, because of some malfunction or other. So overall, the mission was a disaster. But Sally took it all in stride. Best wishes, Sally. Some of us remember you.