Ride Sally Ride

[pdub]

BREAKING NEWS: Sally Ride, first American woman to fly in space, dies of cancer at age 61. Developing.


Dang, I was there in a boat to see her take off in Challenger. All the signs in Cocoa cheered, "Ride Sally Ride." Quite a spectacle.


RIP Sally.

[Deaf Bob]

Wow! She was a groundbreaker for sure!
RIP Sally!

[tedly]

RIP Sally.

[Cyclone03]

Met her and all the active female astronauts on the ramp at March AFB, in 1985 they came in flying NASA T-38's,5 IIRC, very cool.
That was a small piece of history I got to shake hands with, all the women astronauts, Later the same year Krista McCullough came in with her too, just awesome.

"Ride Sally Ride"

[68scott385]

RIP Ms. Ride

[KeithTurk]

Sad Day... we're going to start loosing our Gemini guys soon... and our Apollo folks as well...

[pdub]

Sad Day... we're going to start loosing our Gemini guys soon... and our Apollo folks as well...

Yeah, from all of the early folks Pete Conrad was one of my faves. He checked out in 1999 after dropping his motorcycle on a curve, I think.

He had that twang when he talked, always so calm, the commander of Apollo 12 when they got hit by lightning leaving the pad. "Not sure if we didn't get hit by lightning." And in a later interview, to paraphrase, "I've got my hand of the abort handle on top of 200 million dollars' worth of going-to-the-moon equipment......"

Pete wrecked out of the game early, but Sally's passing was a real unpleasant surprise to me. I hadn't heard she had been sick.

Below is a photo-of-a-photo taken from the boat I was in when Sally and the crew were leaving town aboard Challenger. I didn't want to take it out of the raggedy frame to scan it - it might fall apart.

Used to be you could get close to the pad. This was taken with a 60mm lens on an SLR, so this is really what we saw from where we were parked. The causeway area between us and the pad was where the NASA VIP stands were set up.

After Challenger exploded later on, they moved everybody back from the pad a long way. A LONG way. Like to Titusville, for the most part.