Sally Ride--A Photobiography of America's Pioneering Woman in Space by Tam O'Shaughnessy

Author:Tam O'Shaughnessy [O’Shaughnessy, Tam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Published: 2015-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

A break during training.

After a year of training, Sally was assigned to work with a team to design the space shuttle’s fifty-foot robot arm. She spent two years working on it and little else. Even though this was an engineering job and Sally had been trained as a physicist, she took to it. She was able to imagine how the arm needed to work in space, and she was able to communicate this clearly. Sally’s teammates were impressed.

Sally and the five other female astronauts felt extra pressure to prove themselves. They wanted to show NASA—and the world—that women could do as well as men in every situation. Above all, they wanted to get their turn to fly—they wanted to be assigned to a space shuttle crew. The selection of crews was a mystery: no one really knew how these decisions were made. So the six female astronauts didn’t have a reason to compete against each other. Each just worked hard and tried her best. Yet, the question on everyone’s mind was, when will I fly? The other question they couldn’t help wondering was, which one of us will fly first?

On April 12, 1981, the first space shuttle flight blasted off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Columbia carried only two astronauts on its first flight—veteran commander John Young and pilot Bob Crippen. The brief two-day mission was a success! It proved that the shuttle was an exciting and practical new way to get astronauts to space and back. Never before had a spacecraft launched like a rocket, orbited like a spaceship, and landed like an airplane.

For the second and third flights of the space shuttle Columbia, which launched in November 1981 and March 1982 in turn, Sally was picked as CAPCOM, or capsule communicator. This is an important job: the CAPCOM relays every message from Mission Control on the ground to the astronauts in space. That meant Sally had to know every little thing about the shuttle—every system, every switch, every drawer and its contents, and how to repair every part.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.