A great read for your Sunday morning, Tysonists. NASA had to make some adjustments to accommodate the women in Ride’s astronaut class and later as it prepared to send her to space. It added a women’s locker room, which astronaut Judy Resnik, who later died in the Challenger explosion, festooned with a Tom Selleck poster. Rather than force astronauts to use urine-catching devices that resembled condoms, NASA added commodes to space vessels. Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, “Is 100 the right number?” She would be in space for a week. “That would not be the right number,” she told them. At every turn, her difference was made clear to her. When it was announced Ride had been named to a space flight mission, her shuttle commander, Bob Crippen, who became a lifelong friend and colleague, introduced her as “undoubtedly the prettiest member of the crew.” At another press event, a reporter asked Ride how she would react to a problem on the shuttle: “Do you weep?” Though she met Ride at the frenzied peak of her popularity, Sherr writes, “I did not realize the psychic price she paid for being the first American woman in space.” To be first is to relinquish the complicated specifics of your story and become a caricature, a stand-in for the ideals of a movement or for the hope and pain of a moment in history. When NASA recruited Ride’s class, it was wise enough to select six women rather than one token. “Everyone was watching them,” said Carolyn Huntoon, a biochemist and NASA middle manager who became the female recruits’ unofficial den mother. The women of Ride’s class forged strong bonds. On the night before Ride’s first space flight, astronaut Anna Fisher, then eight months pregnant, kept watch in the darkened cockpit of the shuttle. Only one could be first. For Ride, already a private person, the feeling of being under the microscope was ever present. She became adept at giving cheerful nonanswers to prying questions. At various points in her life, she did have something to hide. Ride was married to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley at the time of her two flights but also had serious relationships with women. When a college friendship turned into something more, “we pretty much kept to ourselves,” says her then-girlfriend Molly Tyson. This was a few years after Stonewall, but the gay-rights movement had yet to go national. Ride attended an anti-war march in Washington and was interested in the nascent women’s movement.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 14:06:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015