It's the birthday of astronaut Sally Ride, born in Los Angeles (1951). When she was young, her teachers used to wheel big black-and-white televisions into the classrooms so that students could watch the space launches, and Ride was fascinated by the space program. She was good at math and science, but she was also an athletic kid who loved to play football in the street with the neighborhood boys. Her parents worried that she would be injured, so signed her up for tennis lessons instead. She was such a good tennis player that Billie Jean King encouraged her to consider a professional career. Ride started college at Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, but she didn't like it, and she was homesick. She dropped out and moved back to California to give her tennis career a try. She said, "Fortunately, I took a long, hard look at my forehand and realized that I was not going to make a fortune with that forehand." So she went back to college, this time at Stanford, which had a better tennis team. She graduated with degrees in Physics and English — her specialty was Shakespeare. When an interviewer asked her whether Shakespearean drama helped her as an astronaut, she said, "I am certain that it did."

She had almost completed her Ph.D. in Physics when she saw an ad in the Stanford student newspaper. It was from NASA, looking for applicants for the astronaut program. Traditionally, NASA had selected former Marines, pilots, and Air Force officers to serve as astronauts, but they were looking for a new pool of applicants. Ride said: "It's something that was just deep inside me. There is really no other way to describe it. The moment I saw the opportunity, I knew that that is what I wanted to do." She applied, and out of 8,000 applicants, she was chosen to be one of 35 new members of the astronaut corps. In that new group of astronauts, there were five other women besides Ride; but when they arrived at the Johnson Space Center, there were only four women out of the 4,000 scientists and engineers. At NASA, Ride worked as an engineer and helped develop a robotic arm for the space shuttle. She was chosen to join the crew of the 1983 Challenger mission, making her the first American woman in space. She was bombarded with questions about how she would handle life in space — reporters asked her everything from whether she would cry to whether it would affect her reproductive organs. Johnny Carson joked that the launch was postponed because Ride was looking for a purse to match her shoes. The week before the launch, she said: "I did not come to NASA to make history. It is important to me that people don't think I was picked for the flight because I am a woman."

The Challenger mission launched on June 18, 1983. Ride spent six days in space, helping to operate the robot arm. She was not only the first American woman in space, but also the youngest person, at the age of 32. When she landed, Ride announced: "The thing that I'll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In fact, I'm sure it was the most fun that I will ever have in my life." She refused to accept a bouquet of flowers, since no one offered flowers to the five male astronauts. Ride went on a second Challenger mission in 1984. She was training for a third mission when the Challenger exploded in 1986. Ride served on the commission that investigated the disaster. She left NASA not long after to teach at the California Space Institute in San Diego. Ride and her partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, founded a company called Sally Ride Science to make science approachable for kids, especially girls. Ride and O'Shaughnessy became tennis friends at age 12, met again as adults and bonded over a shared love of science, fell in love, and were together for 27 years — but they did not publicly acknowledge their relationship until Ride's obituary. She died in 2012, at the age of 61.

She said: "The view of Earth is absolutely spectacular, and the feeling of looking back and seeing your planet as a planet is just an amazing feeling. It's a totally different perspective, and it makes you appreciate, actually, how fragile our existence is. You can look at Earth's horizon and see this really, really thin royal blue line right along the horizon, and at first you don't really quite internalize what that is, and then you realize that it's Earth's atmosphere, and that that's all there is of it, and it's about as thick as the fuzz on a tennis ball, and it's everything that separates us from the vacuum of space."