R.I.P. Sally Ride. One of my childhood heroes. I was obsessed with space as a kid. I spent hours reading H.A. Rey’s guide to the Constellations, building rocket ships with legos, and staring up at the night sky. I had my athlete heroes in poster form on my wall, but alongside Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mario Lemieux were pictures of Yuri Gagarin, Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride, in places of honor. I remember the Challenger explosion as if it was yesterday. I was jumping off of a step, pretending to be the Shuttle while listening on the radio. The loss that day was indescribable to a six year old, and still is among my saddest memories to this day. But, perhaps perversely, my knowledge that Ms. Ride had not been aboard helped me see a future for space in the light of the disaster, and her outspoken work in the post-disaster critiques and analyses gave me hope that all efforts would be made to make another such disaster less likely.
She boldly went where no ONE had gone before. Honestly, Star Trek’s iconic opening sequence changed from “No Man” to “No One” after Ms. Ride’s flight on STS-7. Unlike Tereshkova, whose flight was admittedly more of a propaganda exercise, Ride earned her way into the Astronaut program, the first woman to do so. That opened the door to my young mind. If a girl, cooties-ridden and all that, could be an astronaut, one of the modern titans flying through the heavens... then there was nothing a girl couldn’t do. She was my first realization and catalyst for my childhood feminism. If a girl could be an astronaut, I had no place to tell a girl that they couldn’t do something, and I was damn sure going to stand up and point that out if somebody else tried it with my sister or one of my friends.
I’ve tried to illustrate how much Sally Ride meant to me and my development, but I feel as though my words are woefully inadequate to such an inspiring life. So, I’ll steal hers:
“And we need to focus on the science to keep learning more and more. If we start experimenting with the planet, we could get ourselves in trouble. If we are going to be smart, we had better be really smart.” (src: http://www.ala.org/offices/resources/ride)
For as impactful as she was for my developing viewpoint on the role, there’s no mention of gender. That’s the brilliance of her legacy. We should not limit (as I regrettably may have here) our admiration to solely her inspiration for young girls (I clearly was inspired as a youth with a Y chromosome), but who knows how many young girls she inspired to not take "You're a girl, you can't do that" for an answer? Perhaps the noblest epitaph I can offer her memory is that if my wife and I ever have a daughter, I can only hope she will embody the brilliance and strength of this true american heroine.
