What is sally ride speech?

Answer 1

Sally Kirsten Ride was the first American woman to fly in space, going aloft in the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 and again in 1984. (The very first woman in space was the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova

Answer 2

A lot, 42. After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

Sally Ride

All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.

Sally Ride

Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.

Sally Ride

But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.

Sally Ride

But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.

Sally Ride

Different astronauts sleep in different ways.

Sally Ride

Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.

Sally Ride

For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.

Sally Ride

I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.

Sally Ride

I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.

Sally Ride

I don't have any nicknames.

Sally Ride

I felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and I felt it was very, very important that I do a good job.

Sally Ride

I had both male and female heroes.

Sally Ride

I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.

Sally Ride

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

Sally Ride

I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.

Sally Ride

It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.

Sally Ride

It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.

Sally Ride

It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!

Sally Ride

My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.

Sally Ride

NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts.

Sally Ride

No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.

Sally Ride

On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.

Sally Ride

On both of my flights, everything went very well.

Sally Ride

Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.

Sally Ride

So I decided on science when I was in college.

Sally Ride

So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.

Sally Ride

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

Sally Ride

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.

Sally Ride

Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds - compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.

Sally Ride

The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.

Sally Ride

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.

Sally Ride

The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.

Sally Ride

The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry - astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.

Sally Ride

The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.

Sally Ride

The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.

Sally Ride

The view of Earth is spectacular.

Sally Ride

Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

Sally Ride

We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.

Sally Ride

Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.

Sally Ride

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

Sally Ride

Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.

Sally Ride