Ride was a high-school and college tennis champ years before Title IX mandated that those programs be fairly funded and that schools dole out sports scholarships to women in equal measure to men, and she was the only woman in her first undergraduate physics classes. Ride's first word was "No." As a young child growing up in Southern California, she called herself "Sassy." Playing shortstop for the Dodgers was, her mother told her, the only thing she couldn't do as a girl. "She just asserted herself in a way that said, 'I'm here and I'm capable and I'm doing it.'" "I think she was twenty years ahead of her time in her absolutely unstated demand to be treated as an equal," an early college boyfriend tells Sherr. (Sherr, who has some name-dropping tendencies, also mentions introducing Ride to Betty Friedan.) Ride was unapologetically feminist, but she didn't make career choices with politics in mind. The two women became friends when Sherr covered the space program for ABC News, and Sherr is clearly proud of having rubbed elbows with her. What's refreshing about Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space is that Lynn Sherr paints an evenhanded portrait of Ride as an iconic American whose accomplishments are inseparable from the second-wave feminist moment in which she reached them. Many biographers are tempted to characterize history-making Americans as born rebels who knew from the beginning that they wanted to storm the gates. Then and only then did she start itching for orbit. Ride was content to pursue an academic career until NASA undertook a nationwide effort to recruit women and let them know the club had room for more than white male fighter pilots. The space program was still a closed-door club-inaccessible to her-when she went through school in the early 1970s. When one of Sally Ride's college friends inquired about her astrophysics major, Ride replied simply, "It's about space." Yet she claimed she didn't always aspire to be an astronaut. After a few days of preparation at KSC, Ride and four other astronauts became the first NASA five-member crew to fly in space as they lifted off in the Challenger from Launch Pad 39A.
On June 15, 1983, three days before launch aboard Space Shuttle Challenger, Sally Ride takes a last look at Houston before taking off in a T-38 jet, bound for NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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