Centuries earlier. His crime was revealing the earth is not the center of the universe. Susans was revealing men are not. [laughter] [applause] both of these things are the sort of revolutionary thoughts that have guided most of my professional life, whether as a reporter in print or on television or in writing books. And yes, i have witnessed a lot of revolutions in my career, consider for example, the new yorker cartoon, about 20 years ago, fellow walks into a bookstore walks up to the bespectacled clerk she says to him, nodding wisely, yes, she says books by men are in the basement. Nothing personal gentlemen. The truth of course is that womens books and everything women do and womens place is everywhere right now but whether it is books or on television, or in real life, i actually learned about my place on the planet from a series of experiences that i had while i was working in Television News. One of them was, when i was back at abc news, where i enjoyed a long and wonderful career. One day my piece was done early for world news, what was then 7 00 probably 6 30 news. I got to leave early. I went with my husband over to visit my motherinlaw. I loved her and watched me on television a lot. Never seen me in the same room while the tv was on. So at one point, larry said mother lynn, has a piece on the news and watched. He stood in the front of room and turned on tv. Diana was sitting in her chair watching and i was next to the tv as well. Here is what happened. Tv came on. My piece came on and diana looked at the tv, then she looked at me. Then she looked at the tv and looked at me, back and forth the entire minute and 10 seconds. I dont think she absorbed a word what i was saying. The poor woman who was so smart had escaped from revolutionary czar it russia, under a load of hey, come to new york, started a business in the garment center, ran her whole life brilliantly, raise ad fabulous son. This woman could not understand how i could be on television and in her room at the same time. [laughter] which to me was the genuine article. That is results that when you step outside of the box. I know that is a position or mindset i adopted regularly as a kind of a reality check on that very strong medium medium. On the flip side of the diana story, occurred during the first Space Shuttle liftoff. Im down at the cape for abc news. Im out in the socalled vip area out in front, and Frank Reynolds our anchor who you probably remember, wonderful reporter and anchorman is up in the booth. At one point frank turned to me, and now we go to lynn sherr to find out what is happening in the vip area. It is pitch black. It is predawn. All these folks around us waiting for the first shuttle liftoff you may remember didnt happen until two weeks later. Nonetheless, there we are. While i was doing the whole thing there was a little black and white tv monitor about this big sitting on the ground in front of me so that i could know when frank through it to me. I had earpiece on but i could see what was going on. Frank throws it to me and my producer stands there with her arms out like a bird sort of holding, you know, keeping the crowds away. Im talking into the camera and im kind of looking at the monitor and im, no doubt saying something terribly important and i noticed, the crowd was very hushed which was good for my ego. Then i realized that even though i was standing there, all five feet eight 1 2 inches of me, living, breathing color, every eye in the crowd was looking at black and white seveninch tv monitor. Tv was the reality. Life a mere bystander. This is the sort of thing that went on for much of my television life. As a local Television News reporter in new york i got a call early one morning that there had been, there was a story i had to cover, there had been one of these miracle micro surgery operations. One of the very first ones back in the early 70s, when a mans hand was reattached to his arm and i was supposed to go out to brooklyn to cover the story. There was a press conference about it. I threw on clothes. Randown stairs. Crew picked me up. We drive out to brooklyn. Walk across the parking lot, im carrying a try p. O. D. Someone taking something else. Little old man says hey, youre on television. Yes, im on television. Hey, youre lynn sherr, arent you . , i said, yes, thank you very much. Thank you for recognizing me. He looked at me and said, you look better on television. So i tran to the ladies room and put on makeup and we went from there. After i left that job, and had been off the air several weeks. I was walking on lexington avenue near blame ming bloomingdales in new york someone said, didnt you used to be lynn sherr . How does one respond . It is confusing. One morning back at abc, i was down at the cape getting ready to anchor one of the Early Morning launches. Remember most of the launches were really early in the morning. Which meant if you were anchoring them you had to be this position real real early in the morning or late at night. My husband had come down to join me. It seafaring in the morning. He 4 00 in the morning. I am in the other seat going over last minute notes. He turns to me with his eyes buyerly open and turns to me and says, thank you for sharing the glamorous part of your life. The truth of course it has been very glamorous. Reporting Television News, was i cant say so much for now, but it was a wonderful and exciting and important way live my life. I think we did a very critically important things. I think we saved some lives around i had an awful lot of fun doing it. And i will say that while i loved covering politics, and i loved all the pieces i did about social change and all sorts of things, one of the most exuberant stories i got to cover was covering the Space Program. So writing this new book, sally ride americas first woman in space, has been a combination of a labor of love. Bittersweet basally was my good friend and also a way of reliving and retelling some of the most important moments in our countrys history. In terms of the book, let me start with a cartoon. And the scene is teenage girls bedroom, a surprisingly neat teenage girls bedroom i might add. And it is bursting with science textbooks and posters of the Space Shuttle and astronomy books and globes and all sorts of wonderful things about this this young woman. And the teenager sitting in her tshirt, at her desk, at her computer staring at the monitor. On the monitor is the very sad news that sally ride americas first woman in space has just died. She is looking at the headline sally ride, 19512012. There is picture, very familiar picture of sally. The teenage girl is looking on in utter shock. Not so much what she sees on the screen but the backstory. Behind her is standing her mom and in her mom jeans and the mom is saying something to the girl but the caption is the teenage girl. What the teenage girl is saying to her mom is, wait, wait are you saying it there was a time when there werent any women astronauts . Yes. Exactly. Sally ride, did not grow up with astronaut dreams. Back then the job was simply not available. When she was born in may of 1951, the United States Space Program was a mens club, a white mens club. Restricted to Fighter Pilots and military men. The few women who did apply and keep in mind we have a lot of very qualified women pilots in those days in the early 50s middle 50s out of world war ii and work they had done. But all of these talented women were summarily rejected. Women were considered too weak too unscientific, too well, womanly to fly in the Space Program. One newspaper editorialized that a female in the cockpit would be, and i quote, a nagging back seat rocket driver. Thank you very much. Good gasp. Columnist ridiculed the prospect of winning women as astronauts calling themmals slownets. Sally ride loved nasa as a kid but interest in nasa was simply aspect tate tore. Like most kids in that era certainly some of you watched early space liftoffs when the teacher wheeled in a big black and white tv set with rabbit ears in the classroom and watched john glenn and everybody else take off. She learned tennis. Was so accomplished on junior circuit and womens circuit considered turning pro. She dropped out of college a few months to give it a try. When she realized she would not be one of the elite of the elite, that is all sally ride would have ever settled for she decided that was not the place she needed to be. Years later when she would be asked what it was that had stopped her from a tennis career sally always said which is fully, my forehand. It never stopped her forward progress. When tennis didnt work out pivoted to science. Went up to Stanford University for her undergraduate and her masters and doctorate in astrophysics. Point out, say she was not underachiever. She was double english and astrophysics major when she was an undergraduate. Sally was in the midst of writings her Postgraduate School applications one morning in 1977 january 1977, when she weeks up in the morning. Goes to the stanford Student Union to get a coffee and sweet role to wake up before class. Picks up the stanford daily and never gets beyond the front page. The headline was just above the fold, and it read, nasa to recruit women. Sallys future just dropped in her lap. Nasa was finally reaching out. This is january of 1977 for women and minorities, for the upcoming new Space Shuttle program. Unlike the the tools and the directions of the original Space Program which was to get us to the moon and which, and which meant riding in those little tiny spacecraft mercury, gemini and apollo, john glenn used to joke you didnt so much climb into the mercury capsule as you put it on. So unlike these little tiny spacecraft, the shuttle was now the size of an airplane. They could have larger crews. It was a whole different ballgame. Because we were now not going to just one other place, the moon, but the Space Shuttle would lift off, circle the earth, many many times and then return to earth, there was a chance. There was a chance to do science in space. There was a chance to do experiments. We would launch the hubble space telescope. We would build a spacetation nasa figured out in order to get this done, it was time, they were bowing to some special pressure i should add in legal cases but well leave that aside for now. But it was time to add scientists. People who would conduct experiments in space and do all of these things. They called the new category of astronaut, mission specialist. Thanks to all of these pressures on them and to their own awakening they wanted different genders and different races. So they put out the call for women and minorities and actively recruited them starting in 1976. Sally got the news via the article in the stanford union, the stanford daily in january of 1977. She is sitting there drinking her coffee, reading the article, looks at Job Description of a new kind of astronaut called a mission specialist, says to herself, i could do that. Puts down the paper goes off in search of stationary, a pen and envelope and a stamp. It was that long ago. And immediately sends off to nasa to request an application. Sally was one of more than 25,000 people who wrote in for that application. Eight thousand people filled them in, including more than 1500 women. In the end, after a very long process of interviews and screening and some very anxious moments, sally was one of 35 individuals chosen as the first class of shuttle astronauts. Of them six were women three africanamericans, men and one hawaiian men man. Nasa was suddenly looking like the poster child for multiculturalism and sally was over the moon in her own way. When she got the call telling her the job was hers, sally, who by her own definition was very shy, very private very much an introvert genetically when she got the call she says she went jumping up and down in her bedroom, screaming and yelling. Picks up the phone and calls her best friend from high school. Hi there this is your friendly local astronaut calling. That is the way she identified herself to that friend for the rest of her life. Her parents shared the glory in their own idiosyncratic way. Sally used to joke that her father who taught Political Science at a Community College in Santa Monica Sallys father, she said, never understood science, didnt have a scientific bone in his body. When sally was growing up, studying astrophysics her father could not explain to anyone what she did. Now that im an astronaut she said, his problems are solved. Sallys mother, irrepressible joyce ride, when she got the news, told a reporter with sally going into space and her sister studying to be a minister, one of them would get to heavyp ven. Before heaven. Before she got there sally learned becoming an astronaut in 1978, meant a lot, or a little to a press corps with very little imagination. Keep in mind, january 1978. One woman had flown in space a russian woman she flew in 1963. But because the soviet union was our cold war enemy, there was very little news, no transparency. We knew almost nothing about this woman or what happened in her spaceflight. The United States Space Program for all of its wonderful glory i take nothing away from it, by january of 1978 nasa had flown exactly three females in space, two spiders and one monkey. So sally an academic, a graduate student, she didnt know from press conferences gets to her First Press Conference and she is stunned by the stupidity of questions like arent you afraid of being in orbit with all those men . And do you expect to run into any ufos . Sally calmly answered no to the latter and assured former her academic career as astrophysicist made her very comfortable around males. I first met sally in 1981 when abc asked me to then join our Terrific Team to cover the upcoming Space Shuttle program. As i mentioned the anchor was Frank Reynolds. Our science correspondent was a terrific guy jewels bergman who practically invented field. They want ad third person to the team for variety of reasons. Im describing myself as the color guy in the baseball booth. I was there to do feature stories. Because of number of things i wound up becoming lead reporter and anchoring all Space Shuttle missions and landings through the challenger explosion. It was really fun. My first assignment when i ght to the Johnson Space center in houston, was to, this is april of 1981. The first shuttle was about to launch. Excuse me i went to . January of 1981 to prepare for the first launch in april. My story was do a story on first breed of astronauts women minorities, people who were not jetFighter Pilots of old. We asked nasa a group of individuals who were representative, sally was one of the new bees that nasa offered up. I loved her at first because she spoke english not tech know talk and her direct manner an determination. I asked her why do you want to go intointo space . I expect ad cocky response that you got from the dominant astronaut culture. Instead she says to me, i dont know. She said. I have discovered that half the people would love to go into space and there is no need to explain it to them. The other half cant understand and i couldnt explain it to them. If someone doesnt want to know why, i cant explain it. I thought that was just wonderful. In fraternity of up tight crewcuts she was a breath of fresh feminism readily acknowledging if it werent for the Womens Movement she would not have her job. She also acknowledged that nasa with its 20year heritage of white male Fighter Pilots had finally done the right thing. We became friends immediately. As the program developed and i wound up anchoring abcs coverage, sally and i continued to spend time together. We bonded over cold shrimp and cold beer. And funny stories at a variety of local dives one of which i recall offered mud wrestling which we managed to avoid. We both shared a healthy disregard for the overblown egos and conservative intransigence of both of our professions. Beneath her unemotional demeanor a lot of people found icy, i found a caring friend with a very impish wit. When she married fellow astronaut steve hawley, their home became my beer and pizza hangout during other folks shuttle missions. Sally got her chance five years later. She was the first of six women chosen to fly. She immediately became our newest american hero, a smart and funny and daring optimist who trained endlessly and answered questions tirelessly. The public attention was both flattering and frustrating to her. Still reflecting that, still reflecting the difficulties that some had with accepting the entrance of women into this previously maleonly club. Including the one i would nominate as the dumbest question ever asked at a press conference anywhere, and i have been to a lot of press conferences. We are now ask the the at the, in may of 1983. Sally flew in june of 1983. The crew was up there for their preflight press conference. So it is sally and four men in her crew sitting with her. Questions went along pretty well. Reporter from Time Magazine asks the question dr. Ride, he said, i know that you have been through an entire year of training. I know it has been a very intense year. I know things sometimes go wrong in the simulator. When something does go wrong, when there is a glitch, like the shuttle crashes in simulation, when something really bad happens, how do you handle it, he said . Do you weep . Right. This is 1983. So, were in a room of about half the size of this and most of the press corps including all of the women i might add, kind of rolled their eyes went, oh my goodness, silently. Sally, this moment exists on tape and you can watch this you can dial it up on youtube or something. Sally, gets the question. You see this look on her face like who is this person . She rolls her eyes, and then she starts to laugh and she smiles. She turns to rick hawk the pilot of her mission, sitting to her right, why doesnt anyone ever ask rick these questions . This is why sally ride was the perfect chose for First American woman in space. I if chosen would have clawed the guys eyes out. Sally laughed it off, defused bomb and went on from there. It was totally, totally brilliant. This is what she faced. And, it wasnt just the press. Oh, i should there was another reporter who actually said to her, did you ever wish you were a boy . Sally gritted her teeth said, no, i never thought about it. Within nasa there were a number of other hurdles to leap. Sally, as a First American woman to fly, was asked to make a number of decisions. Everything that flies on the Space Shuttle or on any other american spacecraft with human beings on it, has to be checked for offgassing, for flammability, for all sorts of reasons. So everything in her in the her personal kit, her toiletries kit, if you will had to be checked by nasa. Since no woman had ever flown there were number of questions she sad. Male engineers didnt know what the answer was. Sally very wisely called five other women when she had to make the decision because she understood that every decision she made would devolve every other woman that flew so she wanted them in on it so that was great. Six women managed to get many of the items they take in personal kits aloft changed. Exchanging old spice after the shave lotion and british sterling deodorant for female friendly lotion and positions. Hair restraints. We call them rubber bands. It wasnt just nasa and wasnt just the press. When the original launch date for sallys flight was shifted slightly to accommodate the schedule Johnny Carson joked on the tonight show the shuttle would be delayed so sally ride could find a purse to match her shoes. That was actually the funniest of all the jokes he told over the course of an entire year. I watched them all on tape and i must tell you my faith in the American People has been totally renewed. Because Johnny Carsons jokes really went downhill, totally lame. Mostly frat house gags. And they started out with a little at this timer of titer of audience. Next time he told a joke that was awful, they kind of, next time they were silent, by the end they actually booed him. On the air. In just over a year, nasas selection and sallys conduct transformed female astronauts from a punch line to a matter of national pride. The entire nation was riding with her. When i had my oneonone interview with sally right before she flew, i said look, do you feel under any pressure as the First American woman to go up . She said yes i do feel pressure, she said, not to mess up. So all sally said but i knew just what she meant. She didnt want to mess up for the crew. She didnt want to mess up for the mission for nasa for the United States, for future of human spaceflight. All of these things were terribly important to her. But mostly i think she didnt want to mess up for other women. She understood that if she messed up it would be interpreted that no woman could ever fly as an astronaut but that if she did well, that door would be wide open for everybody. Listen to what another astronaut from another generation pamela melroy, one of only go women to command a shuttle flight said about sallys flight. And i quote. Wasnt until after i became an astronaut that i discovered the most important gift sally gave me she was tremendously competent. The reputation of everyone who comes after you depends on how well you do. Sally opened those doors and smoothed the path for all women because she was so good at what she did. She was really, really good and she was really, really fun. On the day before she flew, all astronauts, before they fly are in quarantine so they dont get contaminated by us with some kind of a germ that would jeopardize the flight. All. Spaces we had at cape. Day before her launch and preparing my script for that nights evening news, and i hear a phone ring and another part of the work space and someone picks it up, they say, lynn for you. I said, okay. I pick up the phone. Little voice says, hi there. What are you doing ten minutes from now . I said, i dont know, sally. What am i doing ten minutes from now . She said walk outside your trailer, turn left, go down the gravel path and stop. I did that. 25 yards away from me was sally ride in shorts cutoff shorts tshirt, flipflops, standing by a car, smiling and waving at me and grinning. She knew i wouldnt come any closer and i wouldnt try to jeopardize her flight. She knew i wasnt going to ask her questions because she wasnt going to answer any, but saying to me, im fine, im happy. Im really excited about this. You can tell the world that americas first woman in space is ready to go. It was a gift to me and it was also the way that i remember her most of all. That is who sally ride was. So june 18th, 1983 was the soft, bright morning at floridas Kennedy Space center. Occasional puffs of white dotting the pure blue sky. At 7 33 a. M. , the space shut sell challenger officially mission, sts7, Space Shuttle transportation system, 7 the 7th flight, launched from the launchpad carrying crew of five. Half a million lined the beaches to share the moment. Many held up tiny daughters up to the sky by way of saying look what you can do when you grow up. As the anchor of abcs coverage that sunny saturday i unabashedly cheered her on. Later in the week, concluding one of my pieces by saying technologically nasa is pushing towards the 21st century but in human terms, it is finally entered the 20th. I should tell you i had trouble getting that particular line past my bosses but i did. I also brought my mother to the launch. My mother was then approaching 80. She was thrilled. She told me afterwards, i saw the horse and buggy. I saw the airplane. And now this. And that there was a woman made it even better. When she landed a week later in Edwards Air Force base in california president Ronald Reagan telephoned congratulations to the entire crew. When he got to sally, he said somebody says sometimes the best man for the job was a woman. You were there because you were the best person for the job. Millions of other women agreed. The mystery of the universe with its infinite who are r horizons and limited access and fiery risk of riding two giant roman candles to get there magnified sallys entry what was all male, cowboy culture into potent cando symbol. Many women, especially young women, translated her bold journey into their own tickets to success. If she can do that they said, we can do anything. Every single door is open. Later when sally came home she was peppered with all sorts of questions. This introvert answered them all. She particularly liked the questions she got from kids, because she said, kids had no filters and they would ask the questions that adults all wanted to ask but were embarrassed to ask. For example, how do you go to the bathroom in space . Sally had a simple explanation. Easy, she said. It is like sitting on a vacuum cleaner. She also talked, about the extraordinary view out the shuttles window. Not only coral reefs off the coast alaska, glaciers in the himalayas, deforestation in the amazon. Something else changed trajectory of her life once again. For the first time she saw the thin blue line encircling our planet. As if someone had taken a royal blue crayon, she said, and drawn it. Recognizing the from gillty of earths atmosphere. Sometimes she changed the metaphor. The ribbon of atmosphere was earths spacesuit. Or it was a slim as the fuzz on a tennis ball. But that is all there was she realized the only thing protecting our planet, our lives, us, our lakes, our trees our seas, everything thats here from the harshness of outer space. And seeing that thin, blue, line is what would later become her motivating impulse for the rest of her life, protecting planet earth. That was just the beginning of her contributions to nasa. After the hideous accident that destroyed challenger and killed seven people on board, nasa was only astronaut and only woman to serve on the commission that investigated it. She was also the source of a critical revelation about the rockets orings that helped pinpoint that problem which i talk about in print in the book for first time. She talked about the other was on the other investigative panel, the disintegration of the columbia as it reentered atmosphere in 2003. On that commission too she was a key player, getting real story about thats is as behavior out to the public. Once the bright new face of nasa sally had become its conscience. She convinced nasa to put a camera in space so, that students could control it remotely from their desks in their classrooms and take pictures of home planet to study impact environment. She called that earth cam. She teamed up with camera to fly cameras on twin satellites orbiting the moon, once again to let students snap pictures of various parts of moon so they could study them and print them out and hang them on their refrigerator doors and she called that one moon cam. She always wanted to give back to kids. She was by then long gone from the says space agency. Beyond the stereotypes. She also wanted to make it a business that would make money. Because that would attract the talents to make it work. She said over and over again to make Science School again. The company was end is sally ride science and share down the barriers in society between the nations of the world. Like all astronaut sally new looking down at planet birth from space there are no borders dividing countries or anything else. That is the sally ride i knew. Smart and witty and could come to new york and put her feet on the coffee table and watch the dumbest Television Programs that never were. She was superb at compromising. Her College Roommate used to say sally could study through whistling tea kettle but then sally said i can be intense and come home and, quote flipflops which marked oblivion. That made her such a terrific friend. There with things i did not know about sally ride. I did not appreciate the psychic price she paid for her celebrity. This introvert who made thousands, tens of thousands of , signed autographs, did all of that, set herself up for every single public occasion. I did not know she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in march of 2011 which would take her life 16 months later at the age of 69. I did know until i wrote her obituary she was in a loving relationship with another woman for 27 years. Sally ride is very good at keeping secrets. I am sorry she felt she was not able to the public about her Long Partnership but is also part of her story because ours is also the story of a particular time and place and a woman who had the brains and agility to seize the moment. When sally was born in 1951 outer space was Science Fiction and womens rights were marginal. The social advances and lucky timing that would enable the gifted young scientists to intersect to makers an inspiring lesson in modern history, she took full good vantage of the ever widening definition of womens place and made sure was everywhere but she could not would not openly identify herself as a gay woman reflects not only her intense need for privacy but the shame and fear and intolerance society can inflict even on its heroes. Tremendously is secure. In the course of writing her biography i found an extraordinary woman. California girl who wanted to save the planet an introvert whose radiant spirit pulled her into Public Service, an academic who could explain rich got to College Students and the wonders of weightlessness to a roomful of little girls lasalle in never planned her life five or 20 years the ten years down the road but when opportunity knocked she was able to open the door and sail right through it. Look at her life she thought she wanted to be a tennis player, pivoted back into science and that didnt work out. She wanted to be an academic, pivoted right into space history when that opportunity presented itself. She knew how to seize the moment and to be ready for it when it appeared. I used to tell her that that moment when she read the article in the stafford newspaper and saw that nasa was recruiting women i said how prescient of you, alex gordon terry, what a life lanes in finkel won game changer. Sally told a different moral from it, i guess the message is she told a lot it college audiences read your college newspaper. She did it all with a smile. Years after her flighty she shared the thought that one day, three times the size of this one, filled with 1,000 youngsters, imagine this room in space, she said to them, you could do 35 somersaults and wrote. My favorite thing about space is being weightless. There is not even a close second. Every eye in the room would be wide. A great recruiting techniques. Sally was an icon to kids and grownups like. At 51 2 sheet and anticipate the best of them. As one colleague put it it was only after you left her presence you realize she was really short. It was that ability to be bigger than you actually are. Flying in space was neither her childhood goal nor her adult commitment. But having done it twice she cherished the inventor. The things ive learned from sally, flying lessons. I think her ability to pay that, to focus, the magnificent optimism that allowed her to ignore adversely and carry on. All of that teaches me and everyone else how to fly high without ever leaving earth. Perlite reminds us that whenever our own personal limits there is something out their way granters and we can measure more models than we can imagine something waiting to be explored. She proved you dont need to have right planning to have the right stuff. After bravely smashing through the celestial Glass Ceiling without messing up she brought back the ultimate flying lesson. She was asked over and over what did you see out there . Si tell us what you saw out there . Sally ride translated the dazzling reality she saw from space into a beam of encouragement for the rest of us on earth. What did she see out there . The stars dont look bigger, she said, but they do look brighter. Sally ride at 61 years on this planet343 hours and 47 minutes and 42 seconds in space, definitely made our lives and writer. I mourn her death twoyears ago but i read police in her life. Was the perfect first and erica woman in space and a terrific friend. Thank you very much. [applause] time for a few questions. If anyone would like to ask the question would they come up the aisle and use this microphone . No questions . [inaudible question] the woman she was, to not fit into society. I think she didnt talk about it much but the answer is she had an amazingly open minded her father was an eisenhower republican, purple heart winner from world war ii, her mother was a reconstructed lefty, she canceled out her husband every single time. Sally grew up in a family that talked about everything deeply believe in education, education was the way forward. She was a baby boomer. Of baby boomer who went and did what she wanted to do, and there are never any barriers, this was a socially openminded family that let their girls do what they want to do not what they thought, not what parents thought they ought to do. Choice ride, it alive and kicking in her 90s and the wonderful woman, husband died some years ago. Benign neglect. Our style of parenting was benign neglect. We let the girls be who they were which i think is understating their influence on her. It was a combination of having wonderful parents. Salad was the beneficiary of exquisite timing. When she came of age and the nasa recruitment started, she already had the advantage of laws being changed, minds being changed more importantly and she fit right into that. She had a couple of very gifted teachers and she talks about a science professor she had in high school who really changed the trajectory of her life. She wanted science and this Science Teacher helped her understand the elegance of science and helped her appreciate what a beautiful thing it was. Sally thought science was fun, science is cool, it was not about a guy with funny einstein hair in a White Lab Coat living in the basement working by himself. Science was about working together. Science was team work. This is why she was a great crew member she loved team work. Cheaper for double to singles in her tennis. All of these things, in making her a Great Team Player and an individual who broke through as many barriers as she could. A wonderful person. Thank you. Where were you back then . What date in june of 83 that she set off . It was june 17th. I will say seventeenth. I have it written down here. I will look it up. I think it the eighteenth june 18th, 1973. How many of you remember sallys lunch . Did it mean something to you . Yes . No . Yes . I think it really did. I think it was one of those seminal moments in america when a lot of people stopped and watched and it made such a huge difference which was great. I am leaving through this for the exact date because i dont want to have said the wrong date and have 1200 people writing the. Any more questions . Yes . June 18th definitely. Did sally ever talk to you you mentioned the pressure she was under as the first female in space, did she talk to you subsequent about the pressure that she was larger than life, she was larger to the public than she was as a person so as she went out all the things she did after being the first woman, she understood the impact. Keep in mind this was not a woman, we could sit and gossiped about people about certain things, she didnt talk about her own feelings. This is not the way she functioned, i knew the way she conducted herself. How much she hated the attention. You know what our celebrity culture is like now. It wasnt that bad in 1983 and subsequently but it was bad. People want to touch you. People want to get in your space. This is so antithetical to who sally ride was. When she would come to new york, the first time she came when she was really famous the nypd have a Bodyguard Service for her and she dismissed them all. Sheep provide on her husband to body block everywhere which was fine. But she knew that other than what i needed for my job i was not going to blow her cover and we would slip in and out of places and i would protect her on occasion as everybody did when asked. To was very troubling to her. The only way i got into her soul a little bit and it is all in the book, during the time of her flight and right after she did keep a journal, never again the rest of her life and she talks about the impact on her soul and talked to me about it but talk to her diary about it and it turns out she consulted a psychotherapist as well. All of those early speeches drove her i dont mean that in a negative way, send her to seek help from up professionals so she could try to understand, i dont remember the exact phrase diary talks about the advice she got was she was trying to understand how or why talking about it so much in public took the experience away from her. She wanted to keep it as her private experience and had to share it with the public. This was troubling to her. I wish she had talked more about herself her soul, her deepest wishes and she just didnt. It was the way she was. Great work on tv. Knowing this is a time of great change i wonder if you have any insight into how the other astronauts on the shuttle flight accepted her. They were certainly openly accepting but how did they really i have spoken to all of them and theyre very good friends of mine, four men and sallys first flight. There are a number of answers to that question. One is on the one hand they were all thrilled to be flying. The goal when you become an astronaut is to fly. They could have said 14 monkeys and four spiders were going and they would be fine with that. Also, all four of them were military guys and with military backgrounds and their hold training was it is not about me. It is about the admission. They were thrilled on one level but sally was the one getting all the attention. They didnt have to do the dreaded press interviews with people like me who say how do you feel about that flight and what will you be doing . They loved that it was sally. They liked the fact that because of sally they were invited to the white house for the First Time Ever they had lunch with president reagan. They liked all of the extra attention they got. They were happy to give it to her. They really liked working with sally. There is no other way to put it. I talked to them all. It is not fake, it is not funny, they became quite good friends and enjoyed working with her, she proved herself not only proved equal weight but surpassed a lot of them in certain ways. Commander bob crippen enjoyed having her on his next flight, he was the commander of and last mission. They liked it just fine. Yes . Why are you broadcasting . I left abc, i should probably have the exact date somewhere but i dont, six years ago. Was time. I have a wonderful career in journalism before it that. The business was changing in a way that i didnt love and i thought it was time for me to answer to my own bells as opposed to a desk telling me what to do. I didnt like the direction things were. Serious challenges that it cant figure out how to cope with, though my generalization of the audience and if rationalization of the audience, and competing for everyones attention. I was lucky enough every time i complained about something Peter Jennings who was one of my closest friends would say we lived through the golden years, and i lived through a great time. I lived through a time in Television News when getting the story was the only thing that mattered when the story more mattered more than the correspondents when news was a Public Service, when the bottom line was less important than getting the truth. A lot of that has changed unfortunately. [applause] there are a challenges they are trying to face right now. I dont like the way they are facing all of them. I think people are trying. There are still terrific reporters out there. With the budget cutbacks, i hate to start this way but when i was a correspondent, when i was in television, we had editors. Not tape editors, film editors, word editors and i could turn into a script and somebody perhaps with more experience and wiser than i would say you cant say that. What is the source of this . And i would go back and find the source and fix it and i would make it right and learn. With pressures of 247 news right now with the budget cutbacks there are not these editors, there is not time stuff is being thrown on the air and to say this is right or wrong theres almost no accountability and it is sad. The public is not as well served as we all should be. One part of 24 7 news is it takes away the methodology that the reporter knows what is going on but by the same token we are trained to ask questions and figure out what is true and not true and the public is not being served many times. I dont mean to be screaming do and gloom but we have a lot of lessons and i love writing books. Thank you. Thank you. Challenging thank you. Sally was very close for a while and i could tell by her manner how she felt. Challenger exploded. You may recall there was a Memorial Service at the Johnson Space center where president reagan spoke very eloquently and i was there. My husband was in california and met me there and we went to dinner with sally and steve and steves father was the minister and spoke of the Public Service that was televised. The next day we were at their house and sally got a phone call and was the phone call asking her to be on the Rogers Commission. I could tell from the grim look on her face how she felt. I knew how she felt. This is something i have to do. Sally was horrified she lost seven friends, crisp and the gulf Christa Mcauliffe was not a friend but she knew her, dick scobee was a close friend, keep in mind this was challenger that exploded during that accident sally had flown on challenger twice. Both times she flew she sat in the Flight Engineer seat. In the cockpit is the commander and pilot and the Flight Engineer sit right behind them. Sallys job on lift off and reentry was she had all but check sheets, checklists opening front of her and if something went wrong, she was the one who called out the sequence of events, nothing ever went wrong judy resnik was sitting in that seat when challenger exploded. Sally said i often thought about judy sitting there because that was my seat. As she got on the commission and learned what happened she was particularly incensed by nasas behavior. Not everyone at nasa, managers, the guys at the Marshall Space Flight center and the people of Martin Thiokol who built the rocket sally said over and over she would shake her head she just was astounded that anybody could do it so badly. I had the only interview with sallied during the Rogers Commission hearings and i said to her given the way things are now would you fly again . She said i am not ready to fly now. Exhibiting the fact she had lost faith at that moment. What is important to know about sally is she didnt say a pox on you, you did badly i never want to talk to you again. Her job was to fix it so she was part of that commission that recommended a set of things they should do ensure enough they did and they did fix it and it did get better and there were many successful launches until columbia in 2003 when she famously said at one of the hearings i am beginning to hear a kind of echo here. Said the same trend to bad management the lesson had been learned but not well enough. Once again they fixed it. Nasa had 133 out of 135 successful shuttle launches. That is a pretty good record that there is no reason those lives had to be lost ever and sally would be the first person to say to you that was wrong and i guess she would say that nasa and messed up. So she was very angry, but such an optimist that she would never have said disband nasa. She said fix it and lets move on. That was her hope. Thank you all. One more as we do one more. Do i have time or not . Sally was a friend with a great relationship it was a real marriage, sally was probably trying to decide when she was doing with her life. I talk about her relationships with men and women and she wound up the way she wanted to go. It makes me sad that she couldnt talk about it publicly. This was her choice and it gave her a little of the k
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