Quotes by Sally Ride

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
• So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
• So I decided on science when I was in college.
• On both of my flights, everything went very well.
• 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.
• Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
• 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.
• The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
• 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.
• The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
• The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
• The view of Earth is spectacular.
• On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
• We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.
• It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.
• When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.
• Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.
• Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
• For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
• 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.
• All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
• Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.
• But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.
• But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
• My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
• 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.
• No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.
• I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
• I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.
• 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!
• Different astronauts sleep in different ways.
• I don't have any nicknames.
• 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.
• I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
• I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
• I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
• I had both male and female heroes.
• 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.
• Facing your fears is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
• The greatest adventure is what lies ahead, with curiosity as our guide.
• Don't be afraid to take risks, the worst that can happen is you'll learn something new.