The First American Woman in Space—And Beyond!
STS-7, which launched on this day in 1983, was one of the first operational space shuttle flights. On paper, it was a routine mission to launch two communications satellites. But STS-7 also carried Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.
When NASA planned the space shuttle program, it hoped to eventually launch one mission a week. That meant it needed a lot more astronauts. In 1978 NASA announced its eighth group of astronauts, the “Thirty-Five New Guys,” its largest class to date.
Six women were among the Thirty-Five New Guys. Sally Ride was finishing her doctorate in physics at Stanford when she applied. When Group 8 was selected, only one woman, Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union, had ever flown in space. Competition among the six women to be the first American woman in space was fierce, and in April 1982 NASA chose Sally Ride to fly on STS-7.
Ride spent six days in orbit on the space shuttle Challenger and became a national hero. She flew again in 1984 on STS 41-G. One of her crewmates was Group 8 classmate Kathryn Sullivan, who became the first American woman to walk in space.
Ride was training for a third shuttle mission when the Challenger exploded in 1986. She was appointed to the investigative commission and played a key role when an anonymous whistleblower gave her the document that pointed to the disaster’s cause. She later served on the commission that investigated the Columbia accident in 2003, becoming the only person to investigate both shuttle disasters.
After Ride died in 2012, obituaries revealed her long-term relationship with another woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy. Ride had kept her sexual orientation private during her NASA career, but the reveal meant that, in 1983, she had also been the first known LGBTQ astronaut to fly.
Source: Britaninica, “Today in History,” by Erik Gregersen.