The first American woman astronaut in space.
Sally Ride was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She was an athletic child who also loved science, but her passion for tennis began when she was nine, while on a year-long family trip in Europe. In addition to practicing tennis professionally, she also focused on her studies, graduating high school with the aspiration to become an astrophysicist.
Ride got accepted to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania on a full scholarship, winning the Eastern Intercollegiate Women’s Singles championship in 1968 and 1969. After three semesters, she transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, aiming to become a professional tennis player. Soon, she realized she didn’t have what it took to be the best and decided to focus on her studies.
Ride moved to Stanford University and graduated in 1978 with a Ph.D. in physics and astrophysics.
In 1977, Ride came across an advertisement in the students’ newspaper that NASA was recruiting scientists for the Space Shuttle program. She applied and got accepted into NASA Astronaut Group 8, one of 35 out of 8000 applicants.
While in training, she started a relationship with Steven Hawley, also a member of Group 8. They got married in 1982 (divorced five years later).
On June 18th, 1983, Ride took off on the Space Shuttle Challenger and became the first American woman in space and the third woman in history. She returned to space for her second and last mission in 1984.
Ride left NASA in 1987 to pursue an academic career. Two years later, she was appointed a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and director of the California Space Institute, retiring from Cal Space in 1996 and UCSD in 2007.
Her passion for space and longtime desire to encourage youngsters, especially girls, to study science and technology led her to participate in several educational programs, including the EarthKam and GRAIL MoonKAM projects in collaboration with NASA. These projects have enabled people to view, request and use pictures of the Earth and moon from space. She also co-established “Sally Ride Science” (2001), which promotes and educates teachers and students in STEM.
She died from cancer in 2012. Read more...
A physician, an engineer, and an astronaut who was the first African-American woman to travel in space.
Born in Decatur, Alabama, and moved to Chicago at the age of 3. From a young age, she had an interest both in science and in dancing, but at college, she had to decide which goal to pursue, and after her mother told her “You can always dance if you’re a doctor, but you can’t doctor if you’re a dancer,” Jemison chose science.
At 21, she graduated from Stanford University and got her M.D degree from Cornell Medical College when she turned 25. Afterward, she joined the Peace Corps and served for two years as a Medical Officer. When she was 31 years old, Jemison got accepted into NASA’s Astronaut Program, becoming the first African-American woman to be admitted into the program.
In her only space mission, she conducted experiments on weightlessness and motion sickness on herself and her fellow crew members. At 37, she resigned from NASA and founded her own company for research, develop, and market science and technology for daily life.
Jemison published six books and is using her public platforms to advocate for the quality of healthcare in the USA and the Third World. Read more...
The first Indian-American female astronaut to go to space.
Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, India. When she was only 20 years old, after getting a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Aeronautical Engineering, she moved to the US. There she earned a double master’s degree and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering. At 26, she started working at NSA as a researcher of computational fluid dynamics, and then as a vice president and research scientist specializing in simulation of moving multiple body problems.
Two years later, Chawla joined the NASA Astronaut Corps, and at age 36, she made her first air mission, making history as the first Indian origin woman and the second Indian person to fly in space.
In her second mission to space, in 2003, Chawla died along with six other crew members when the space shuttle, Columbia, broke apart while reentering the atmosphere of earth, an event known as the ‘Columbia Disaster.’ She was 41 years old. Read more...
