Sally Ride Quotes

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

It was hard to become an astronaut. Not anywhere near as much physical training as people imagine, but a lot of mental training, a lot of learning. You have to learn everything there is to know about the Space Shuttle and everything you are going to be doing, and everything you need to know if something goes wrong, and then once you have learned it all, you have to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice until everything is second nature, so it's a very, very difficult training, and it takes years.

It's no secret that I've been reluctant to use my name for things.

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

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

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

That's something that is almost part of being human and I'm certain that will continue.

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.

You know, I go around the country a lot.

Suppose you came across a woman lying on the street with an elephant sitting on her chest. You notice she is short of breath. Shortness of breath can be a symptom of heart problems. In her case, the much more likely cause is the elephant on her chest. For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences. That is the elephant. Until the playing field has veen leveled and lingering stereotypes are gone, you can't even ask the question.

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

If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.

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.

Anything from making a mistake on an experiment that would ruin some scientist on earth's experiment - career, potentially - to doing something wrong with the satellite that a country was depending on for its communications, to making some mistake that could actually cost you and the crew either a mission or your lives. So there is a lot of pressure that's put on every astronaut to just make sure that he or she understands exactly what to do, exactly when to do it, and is trained and prepared to carry it out.

I have a lot of common sense. I know what needs to be done and how to approach it. I have an ability to work with people on large enterprises.

So I decided on science when I was in college.

The view of Earth is spectacular.

Ever been to Disneyland? That was definitely an E ticket!

Eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help. Whether it's going to be a consortium or one entity remains to be seen. I could be wrong. I could be one of the old fogies! Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing. It happens. A company has to be willing to bear the risk of its rocket failing. It's a very large capital investment.

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.

You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.

I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals.

I never went into physics or the astronaut corps to become a role model. But after my first flight, it became clear to me that I was one. And I began to understand the importance of that to people. Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday. You can't be what you can't see.

Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.

I love the John Glenn model... I may call NASA in 25 years or so, and see if they'd like to send me to Mars.

It's well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they're in middle school.

It was a real honor for me to get to be the first woman astronaut. I think it's really important that young girls that are growing up today can see that women can be astronauts too. There have actually been a lot of women, who are astronauts, that that's a career that's open to them.

Studying whether there's life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there's something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That's something that is almost part of being human, and I'm certain that will continue.

For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.

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

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

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

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.

Different astronauts sleep in different ways.

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.

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

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

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.

The view of earth is absolutely spectacular, and the feeling of looking back and seeing your planet as a planet is just an amazing feeling. It's a totally different perspective, and it makes you appreciate, actually, how fragile our existence is.

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.

There's a huge amount of pressure on every astronaut, because when you get right down to it, the experiments that are conducted on a space flight, or the satellites that are carried up, the work that's to be done, is important and expensive work, and you are up there for a week or two on a Space Shuttle flight. The country has invested a lot of money in you and your training, and the Space Shuttle and everything that's in it, and you have to do things correctly. You can't make a mistake during that week or two that you're in space.

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.

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

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

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

The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.

I think maybe it's too bad that our society isn't further along and this is such a big deal. I think it's time...that people realize that women in this country can do any job they want to do.

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