may 2011 space shuttle endeavor lego sets test gravity

She won all six of her intercollegiate tennis matches, and became the Eastern Intercollegiate Women's Singles champion. She played golf, and made Swarthmore's field hockey varsity team. : 28–29 She commenced classes at Swarthmore on September 18, 1968. She was interviewed by Fred Hargadon, the dean of admissions, who was impressed by both her mental and her tennis ability. Her friend Sue Okie was interested in going to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, so Ride applied too. She graduated in June 1968, and then took a class in advanced math at Santa Monica College during the summer break. Ride resolved to become an astrophysicist. : 19–22 Elizabeth Mommaerts, who taught human physiology, became a mentor. : 22 She attended Encino Elementary School, Portola Junior High (now Portola Middle School), Birmingham High School and then, as a sophomore on a tennis scholarship, Westlake School for Girls, an exclusive all-girls private school in Los Angeles. By 1963 Ride was ranked number 20 in Southern California for girls aged 12 and under. : 12–15 She enjoyed sports, but tennis most of all, and at age 10 was coached by Alice Marble, a former world number one player. In Spain, Ride played tennis for the first time. In 1960, when she was nine years old, the family spent a year traveling in Europe.

Ride grew up in the Van Nuys and Encino neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Bill, earned a master's degree in education at the University of California, Los Angeles, : 4–6 and became a political science professor at Santa Monica College. After the war he went to Haverford College on the G.I. Army in Europe with the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II. Her mother, who was of Norwegian descent, had worked as a volunteer counselor at a women's correctional facility. : 7–8 Both parents were elders in the Presbyterian Church. : 4–6 She had one sibling, Karen, known as 'Bear'. Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, : 6 the elder child of Dale Burdell Ride and Carol Joyce Ride née Anderson. 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. She served on the committees that investigated the loss of Challenger and of Columbia, the only person to participate in both. Ride worked for two years at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. Her second space flight was the STS-41-G mission in 1984, also on board Challenger.

Ride operated the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve SPAS-1. The mission deployed two communications satellites and the first Shuttle pallet satellite (SPAS-1). In June 1983, she flew in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission. 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. She was selected as a mission specialist astronaut with NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first class of NASA astronauts to include women. 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 the youngest American astronaut to have flown in space, having done so at the age of 32.

Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman and the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist.

May 2011 space shuttle endeavor lego sets test gravity