Sally Ride, America’s 1st spacewoman, dies
Sally Ride
Sally Ride, the first American woman to journey into space, died on Monday after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, her foundation announced. She was 61.
Ride first launched into space in 1983 aboard Challenger on the seventh mission of US space shuttle program. US President Barack Obama called her a “national hero and a powerful role model” who “inspired generations of young girls to reach for the stars”.
“Sally’s life showed us that there are no limits to what we can achieve and I have no doubt that her legacy will endure for years to come,” he added, in a statement offering condolences to Ride’s family and friends. Nasa administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement Ride “literally changed the face of America’s space program” and that “the nation has lost one of its finest leaders, teachers, and explorers”.
The agency’s deputy administrator Lori Garver added that the trailblazing astronaut was a “personal and professional role model to me and thousands of women around the world”.
Tributes quickly poured in on the micro-blogging website Twitter, including from women who remembered learning as young girls of Ride’s pioneering flight. “I was seven in the summer of 1983. Sally Ride was simply everything,” read one. Another declared: “RIP Sally Ride — you inspired me to believe that, as a female, anything was possible. May your journey to the stars be swift”. Ride said she was so dazzled that she only later “came to appreciate what an honor it was to be selected to be the first (US woman) to get a chance to go into space.”
Her groundbreaking space voyage came two decades after the first Soviet women flew into space. Valentina Teresh-kova, a 26-year old textile worker, in 1963 became the first woman in space, orbiting Earth in her Vostok VI spaceship. The second Soviet woman in space, Svetlana Savitskaya, a former pilot also became her country’s first female space walker in July, 1984.
Ride, born May 26, 1951, in southern California, earned degrees in physics and English from Stanford University.
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