Video: 'STS7 Live Launch LS 6 18 83'
(Saturday, June 18, 1983, launch at 7:33:00 a.m. EDT; during STS-7) — Astronaut Sally K. Ride became the first American woman to be rocketed into space today as she and four colleagues (commander Robert L. Crippen, pilot Frederick H. Hauck and Ride’s fellow mission specialists John M. Fabian and Norman E. Thagard) blasted off aboard the space shuttle Challenger on a busy six-day mission.
The winged spaceship was launched on schedule from Cape Canaveral, Florida, after one of the smoothest countdowns of the shuttle program. It carried two communications satellites, an assortment of scientific experiments, and a West German satellite that is to be released and then retrieved in a critical test of the shuttle’s 50-foot mechanical arm.
On future missions, astronauts were expected to release small satellites with the mechanical arm and to rendezvous with ailing satellites to retrieve them for repairs in orbit or back on the Earth.
Video: '1983: STS-7 Challenger(NASA)'
Ride, who joined NASA in 1978, became the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. She was also the youngest American astronaut to have flown in space, having done so at the age of 32.
Ride was a graduate of Stanford University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1973, a Master of Science degree in physics in 1975, and a Doctor of Philosophy in physics in 1978 for research on the interaction of X-rays with the interstellar medium.
She was selected as a mission specialist astronaut with NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first class of NASA astronauts to include women. After completing her training in 1979, she served as the ground-based capsule communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights, and helped develop the Space Shuttle’s robotic arm.
Video: 'Sally Ride - The First American Woman In Space | Mini Bio | BIO'
She flew into space today on the STS-7 mission. The mission deployed two communications satellites and the first Shuttle pallet satellite (SPAS-1). Ride operated the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve SPAS-1.
Her second space flight was the STS-41-G mission in 1984, also on board Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. She left NASA in 1987.
Having been married to astronaut Steven Hawley during her spaceflight years — and in a private, long-term relationship with former Women’s Tennis Association player Tam O’Shaughnessy, she is the first astronaut known to have been LGBT.
Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012.
