Historic Ride : First U.S. Woman in Space Now Teaches, Heads UCSD Space Research Project

Sally Kristen Ride, the first U.S. woman in space, looks at the headlines these days and, like many Americans, reacts with a mixture of marvel and disbelief: Communism crumbles in Europe. An enemy of apartheid is freed. Superpowers insist on a reduction in nuclear arms.

Ride, 38, is a pivotal figure in the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which, as much as any tentacle of the government, came to symbolize competition with the Soviets. Now, with opportunists from Russia to Romania jumping on the capitalist bandwagon, and Japan getting serious about space, where does this leave the country that first put people on the moon?

Ride isn’t sure, and her reply is one of cautious skepticism. Sitting in her office at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she directs the California Space Institute (Cal Space), she simply sighed and shook her head.

“It’s well accepted that we have a national shortage in scientists and engineers,” Ride said last week in a rare interview. “We have a whole range of physical sciences and engineering disciplines that are widely recognized to be suffering the ills of a serious problem. Both the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences say we’re not training enough scientists and engineers, and sooner or later we’ll suffer the consequences.”

A dual concern is the low number of women and minority members entering the scientific disciplines. Ride said science--or, for that matter, the space program itself--has not been made “interesting or attractive enough” to children, the only potential astronauts America has.

“Kids are very smart, very clever,” Ride said. “They can see that most scientists are white males, that the stereotype is white males. If the message we give, however subtle, is that English or nursing would be better for those kids to go into, then those are the fields they’ll choose.”

Partly because she believes that the educational crisis in America is acute, if not severe, Ride chose to abandon her career as an astronaut and return to academia. She had received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1978 and promptly left for Houston to begin training as a space pioneer.

She participated in two missions of the space shuttle Challenger. In 1983, she operated a cargo-handling arm in the shuttle’s cargo bay, deploying and retrieving a 3,200-pound instrument package. She also helped launch a seven-ton communications satellite.

In 1984, Ride, a native of the San Fernando Valley, shared the shuttle with grade-school classmate Kathryn D. Sullivan. On Ride’s second mission, her achievements were partially eclipsed by those of Sullivan, who became the first American woman to walk in space.

In the wake of the Challenger explosion in January, 1986, Ride served as a member of the presidential panel investigating history’s worst space accident. In August, 1987, she left NASA for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Controls. She came to UC San Diego as a physics professor in June and now alternates between teaching physics and heading Cal Space, the $3.3-million research institute that encompasses all UC campuses from its base in La Jolla.

A spokeswoman for UCSD said Ride is paid $55,100 based on a nine-month appointment at the university. She receives a $6,000 stipend for her work with Cal Space and has the option for an additional $11,644, which she can get by teaching summer school. Ride said she hopes to remain at UCSD “quite a long time,” given that she’s a native of Southern California and “that we’ve got a lot to accomplish.”

She said neither of her parents was a scientist--her mother was a homemaker, her father a political science professor--but, from the time she was very young, she was interested in math and science and in stargazing through a telescope, her favorite childhood gift. Her only sibling, a sister, is a Presbyterian minister.

Ride has always been interested in writing, she said; she majored in physics and English at Stanford, receiving both a bachelor of science and bachelor of arts degree. She later wrote a children’s book titled “To Space and Back.” She said she would love to write more, but added with a laugh: “Writing’s too hard. It’s much harder than anything I’ve done.”

Ride confirmed that launch is the most exhilarating, the most frightening, moment she has ever experienced, in space or anywhere else.

“The main engine light goes on, and you know you’re on the launch pad another seven seconds,” she said. “The solid rocket light comes on, and you leave the pad. It’s the most sudden, overwhelming feeling, a feeling of utter and complete helplessness. . . . At that point, you’re completely in the hands of fate.”

When the Challenger exploded into fragments not long after Ride’s second mission, she faced the task of trying to figure out why and offering a blueprint of improvements while dealing with “grief work.” Just about every person on board was an intimate friend.

“Judith Resnick, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka. . . . We were all very close,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Those were the astronauts I entered the program with.”

Ride believes NASA is now on the right path, given that safety has emerged as the highest priority.

One of the victims of the Challenger explosion was a civilian astronaut, schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe. Ride said she believed at the time that to include civilians on shuttle missions was a mistake, perhaps a tragedy in the making. She said the advent of space-bound civilians--even newscaster Walter Cronkite and pop singer John Denver were rumored to be going--was grossly premature.

“Veteran astronauts knew that better than anyone,” Ride said.

She said a reintroduction of civilians is a good idea, “but its time has yet to come. It may be decades. The shuttle is an amazingly high-tech and risky vehicle; it’s occupied by professionals for a reason.”

Ride said she still has the itch to return to space, but figures she probably won’t. She wanted to return to professorial life even before the tragedy. She believes the classroom can be an effective launch pad for all kinds of aerospace innovations, many of which she hopes to get started at Cal Space.

Much of her work at Scripps will focus on satellite remote sensing of Earth, climatology, propulsion and robotics. Specific projects include cloud effects on radiative energy, the El Nino effect, and space and sea automation. Ride believes space can play a huge role in helping to preserve the world’s rain forests and the study of a host of environmental issues.