Quotes By Sally Ride

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

I did not come to NASA to make history.

I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.

I don't have any nicknames.

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've spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don't see why I should start now.

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

I think 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.

So I decided on science when I was in college.

Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds - compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.

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

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

You know, I go around the country a lot.

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.

On both of my flights, everything went very well.

It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!

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

The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.

My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.

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.

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

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

I've discovered that half the people would love to go into space and there's no need to explain it to them. The other half can't understand and I couldn't explain it to them. If someone doesn't know why, I can't explain it.

We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.

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

Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.

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

The experience of being in space didn't change my perspective of myself or of the planet or of life. I had no spiritual experience.

But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.

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