The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it. – Sally Ride
I have a lot of common sense. I know what needs to be done and how to approach it. I have an ability to work with people on large enterprises. – Sally Ride
After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong. – Sally Ride
My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane. – Sally Ride
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
But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program. – Sally Ride
So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight. – Sally Ride
The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class – my class had 29 men and 6 women – those men were all very used to working with women. – Sally Ride
We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form. – Sally Ride
Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle’s robot arm to release a satellite into orbit. – Sally Ride
Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight. – Sally Ride
Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It’s very busy up on the shuttle. – Sally Ride
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it’s not the same – it’s not even close to the same. – Sally Ride
The food isn’t too bad. It’s very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program. – Sally Ride