Fellow astronaut Kathryn Sullivan remembers Sally Ride

What are the odds that two girls in the same first-grade class in 1958 would both grow up to fly in space?

Unlikely as it seems, Sally Ride and Kathryn Sullivan were grade school classmates who served together on the 13th space shuttle flight in 1984. They joined NASA together in 1978, when both were 26.

Sullivan is now an assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, and deputy administrator, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She recalled her former colleague on Monday after learning that Ride, the first U.S. woman to travel to space, had died of pancreatic cancer.

“She was extremely intelligent, and very high energy,” Sullivan said. Ride “set high standards for herself and strove to reach them,” she added, but “she also had a very mischievous sense of humor.”

Ride and Sullivan flew together on the Challenger shuttle a mere six years after they became members of the same astronaut class at NASA, which included 29 men and six women. Ride was “the first of the six of us to fly,” Sullivan said. “It puts her on a different plane and I think she wore that well and put that to good use when she got into science education.”

Over the years, the two women have collaborated many times, teaching classes together or celebrating the milestones in space exploration. Sullivan said Ride made many “tangible, measurable contributions … to physics, to space flight, to NASA.”

But at the end of the day, Sullivan added, “I think the grandest part of her legacy will be the many, many ways … she has raised the sights and raised the game of teachers and students, getting them literally to reach for the stars.”

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