Quotes By Sally Ride

I had both male and female heroes.

NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts.

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

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.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.

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.

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

The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.

For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.

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

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.

It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.

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.

I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.

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.

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.

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

On both of my flights, everything went very well.

For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.

You know, I go around the country a lot.

I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.