44 years ago, Sally Ride became both the first American woman and the first known LGBTQ+ to travel to space.
Posted by killuaz0ldyck9
44 years ago, Sally Ride became both the first American woman and the first known LGBTQ+ to travel to space.
Posted by killuaz0ldyck9
15 Comments
Perfect last name. Good for her!
She’s a legend. Paved the way for Christina Koch and many other women.
Didn’t know she was LBTQ+
Didn’t they write a song about her in the 50’s?
Sally Ride’s sexuality wasn’t revealed until after she died in 2012. NPR’s Short Wave has a great podcast episode about her, featuring an interview with her life partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. [https://www.npr.org/2021/06/22/1009098412/loving-sally-ride](https://www.npr.org/2021/06/22/1009098412/loving-sally-ride)
For those who didn’t know that Sally Ride was LGBTQ (like me):
It was revealed in her obituary when she passed in 2012 that she had been in a 27 year relationship with another woman. She was not out publicly, and had been married to a man & fellow astronaut during her time with NASA
National Geographic put out a documentary on her last year that includes her long time partner and a lot about her decision not to come out while she was alive. You should be able to stream it on Hulu/Disney.
She was one of my childhood heroes. I’m still looking for one her quarters.
everyone’s gay in space
Well this makes me think that the book Atmosphere was inspired by Sally.
She was also the whistler-blower who was instrumental in revealing the cause of the Challenger disaster. She’d discovered the cause of the accident (and the negligence behind it), but as she was still working for NASA at the time, she [passed the information](https://emptysqua.re/blog/who-broke-the-challenger-investigation/) to someone else, and the rest is history.
Her fellow physicist, Richard Feynman, is generally publicly credited as the guy who “discovered” the fault with space shuttle’s o-rings. As Feynman is an actual genius, everybody bought the story. But in reality, as revealed after Ride’s death, Feynman was putting on a show to protect Ride’s career.
*~one hundred tampons~*
what an absolute icon
I was just listening to a [podcast](https://www.si.edu/sidedoor/right-stuff-wrong-sex) on how, for a decade plus, the US government went out of its way to deny women the chance to go to space. This was despite the fact that the first [NASA’s head of life sciences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Lovelace_II) believed that women might actually be *more* suited to be astronauts than men!
At that point, NASA required all astronauts to be air force jet test pilots. However, women were not accepted into the air force schools then, making it impossible for women to qualify.
Efforts to change that got shut down at every turn: John Glenn, the 5th person to ever go to space, testified in front of congress, “the fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.” A female aide of then vice president Lyndon B. Johnson drafted a letter to NASA telling them to change the requirement, but Johnson stopped her from sending it.
Instead, the first woman to go to space, Valentina Tereshkova, came from Soviet Russia. Ironically, Valentina got her chance because the Soviets had erroneously believed that NASA was about to send a woman to space, and were determined to beat them to the milestone.
They’d wind up beating NASA by 20 years: Valentina went to space in 1963, Sally Ride would do it in 1983. Valentina would become the 12th human to go to space. Sally, on the other hand, was the 120th to do so.
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While I think this is super cool, I also look forward to a day where Americans are mature enough where it truly doesn’t matter what anyone’s identity is or sexual preference is when they are just doing their job.