On July 4, 2023, astatue of Sally Ridewas unveiled on the grounds of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California. The bronze sculpture captures Ride in mid-step, reaching out to lift a scale
I did a lot of stories with Sally where I had to convince her [to take part], like when she did our interview during the Rogers Commission [investigating the shuttle Challenger disaster] and I had the only interview. She did not want to do it at first, and then she finally said okay...
Both of those missions used the Space Shuttle Challenger. Ride had been assigned to a third mission, but in 1986 that craft was destroyed after liftoff, killing seven crew members, in what is known as the Challenger disaster. Following this, Ride’s subsequent mission was canceled as the Spac...
Six months before thespace shuttleChallengerexplodedon January 28, 1986,Roger Boisjolywarned that cold weather could disrupt the seals connecting the solid rocket booster together. “The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” Boisjoly, a mechanical ...
Space shuttle Challengerwas the second shuttle to reach space. On April 4, 1983, the Challenger made its first debut. Its mission was to deploy the first satellite in the Tracking and Data Relay System. This flight carried the first American female astronaut namedSally Rideinto space and enable...
In 1986, the shuttle Challenger exploded in flight and the entire crew was lost. NASA suspended the shuttle program for several years, while the reasons for the disaster were investigated and corrected. After several years, the space shuttle flew again and a new shuttle, Endeavour, was built ...
The woman was physicist Sally Ride, who joined NASA in 1978 and flew aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. Read More Astronaut Training A Mercury astronaut trains in the gimbal rig to learn how to recover if his space capsule spun out of control. GRC/NASA Applicants accepted as ...
The Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986. Here, the people who were there remember what went wrong on that fateful day.
Space exploration - Shuttle, Astronauts, Missions: After the success of the Apollo 11 mission, NASA proposed an ambitious plan for a series of large space stations to be developed during the 1970s and a new reusable space transportation system to send pe
Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) became the first American woman in space when she launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 18, 1983, on board space shuttleChallenger. A pioneer of the final frontier, she charted a new course for Americans to follow, not onl...