Seen on the flight deck of the space shuttle Challenger, astronaut Sally K. Ride, STS-7 mission specialist, became the first American woman in space on June 18, 1983.
Photo credit: NASA Thirty-nine years ago Saturday, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. The milestone marked a new era in spaceflight that has continued to encourage girls and women to pursue careers in spaceflight.
But for Ride, she was doing the job she trained for. Ride's spaceflight happened nearly 20 years after Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space and still is the only woman to fly a solo mission.
Today the Russian space program has only a few women cosmonauts, and just four women cosmonauts have flown in space. Ride described her experience as the first female American space explorer in an interview with Johnson Space Center in 2002.Ride told interviewers she learned NASA was recruiting women to be astronauts in 1978 when she saw an advertisement in the Stanford University student newspaper.After flying to Houston to be part of the final 200 candidates and going through a week of interviews, meetings and medical exams, Ride said she learned she was an astronaut candidate during an early morning phone call.ASTRONAUTS TO GET A NEW SET OF WHEELS FOR RIDES TO LAUNCH PAD"My biggest frustration was that it was five or six in the morning in California, so all my friends and family were asleep," Ride said in the 2002 interview. "I wasn’t sure that I should wake them up to give them the news!"Ride was in the middle of earning her Ph.D.