Quotes By Sally Ride

One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.

There are aspects of being the first woman in space that I'm not going to enjoy.

For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.

It's well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they're in middle school.

Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

I did not come to NASA to make history.

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.

Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.

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

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

I don't have any nicknames.

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.

So I decided on science when I was in college.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You know, I go around the country a lot.

On both of my flights, everything went very well.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.