1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Sally Ride
Sally Ride photo

Sally Ride Quotes

Total quotes: 15
“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.”
— Sally Ride, COVER STORY: Private Property : Ask Sally Ride About Her Research. Or Her Program to Revolutionize Science Education in America. But Skip the Queries on the Glory of Space Travel, and Don't Even Think About Anything Personal.
Tagged: Science, Curiosity, Knowledge, Adventure, Investigating
“They were very excited. They all went down to Florida to watch the launch, and they spent time there and at NASA during the flight. They were very excited about the whole process. I'm sure they were a little nervous, too!”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: Florida, NASA, Astronauts
“I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space. I felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and I felt it was very, very important that I do a good job.”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: NASA, Astronauts, Female Astronauts
“The worst question that I’ve gotten was whether I cried when we got malfunctions.”
— Sally Ride, Sally Ride on Dumb Questions- Blank on Blank
Tagged: Sexism, Female Astronauts, Gloria Steinem
“Really the only bad moments in our training involved the press. Whereas NASA appeared to be very enlightened about flying women astronauts, the press didn't appear to be.”
— Sally Ride, The first American woman in space said this was the dumbest question the media ever asked her
Tagged: NASA, Female Astronauts, Press Coverage
“I wish that there had been another woman on my flight. I think it would've been a lot easier.”
— Sally Ride, The first American woman in space said this was the dumbest question the media ever asked her
Tagged: Female Astronauts
“My parents must have done a great job. Anytime I wanted to pursue something that they weren’t familiar with, that was not part of their lifestyle, they let me go ahead and do it.”
— Sally Ride, A Ride in Space
Tagged: Parents, Parenting
“Looking back on it, it never really occurred to me that I couldn’t accomplish anything I wanted to. I think that there’s a lot of credit due my parents—and teachers that I was lucky enough to run into—that I really never did think that I couldn’t do something because I was female. I don’t ever remember thinking that and that’s a wonderful thing to be able to say.”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: Female Role Models, Female Heroes, empowerment
“I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents. 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 space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: Challenger Explosion, NASA, Space Travel, Safety
“The space shuttle has something that looks very much like a toilet. And on Earth, a toilet works because of gravity. It pulls the water away from your body. In space, you have to use something to pull the liquid from your body, so the space toilet uses air suction. It pulls the liquid from your body, and it works very well.”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: Space Shuttle, Space Toilets, gravity
“I wasn't really scared. I was very excited, and I was very anxious. When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen. 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.”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: Astronauts, Space Travel
“I think there probably is life, maybe primitive life, in outer space. There might be very primitive life in our solar system—single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won't know about that for a long time.”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: Extraterrestrial Life, Solar System
“Over the many years since my flight, it became clear to me there are a lot of kids, including girls, who are curious about science, about the world, about life on Mars, about how to design a roller coaster. But they lose that, partly because our system doesn't put a lot of emphasis on science and math.

It's not cool to be a scientist or engineer. These kids want to do things that are cool—like be a pro basketball player, an actor, a singer, a playwright. Things that out culture puts in front of them in papers and on TV all the time. When they're relatively young, they think science is cool and interesting, but they lose that in socializing. That was the motivation for Sally Ride Science.”
— Sally Ride, Mike Drummond Interview with Sally Ride
Tagged: Female Astronauts, Female Role Models, Mars
“I liked launch better. It's much more exciting. And it's very different from any experience you can have on earth. 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's a very exciting experience. Landing is very exciting, too, but during landing the space shuttle acts very much like an airplane. So although it's different in many ways from landing on an airplane, in some ways the feeling is familiar.”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: NASA, Astronauts, Space Travel
“Different astronauts sleep in different ways. I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space 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. Some astronauts sleep in sleeping bags that are Velcroed into one of the walls in the shuttle. 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!”
— Sally Ride
Tagged: Astronauts, Sleep, Weightlessness
loading next page...