Dr. Sally takes students for a ride
By Jason Barber

On Sept.15, the first woman in space, Sally Ride, gave a speech at Jesse Hall for the Delta Gamma Foundation Lectureship in values and ethics.

She covered several topics in her speech. Ride spoke on her experiences in outerspace, presented a slide show of photographs she had taken and shared what it’s like to work for NASA. She also highlighted her interests in programs that offer great opportunities for women to pursue careers in math, engineering and science.

Ride was always a fan of the sciences. When pursuing her Ph.D. in astrophysics at Stanford University, she saw an advertisement in a student newspaper for applications to NASA to become an astronaut. She said she knew right away that was what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She applied and was accepted along with 34 others out of 8,000 applicants.

After a few years of training, Ride was selected to become the first woman in space. She flew into space twice. She served as a flight engineer on each expedition. Her duties were to operate the complex computer systems on the shuttle and do checklists to perform operations safely if encountered with accidents or emergency situations while flying at high speeds far away from Earth.
The space shuttle orbits the earth at 17,500 miles per hour, or five miles per minute. Ride said the most beautiful thing to see from space is the sunrise and sunset, which from 125 miles above earth and at that speed, she saw 16 times a day. That’s once every 45 minutes.

After an impressive slideshow, Ride spoke about the small and declining number of women in the fields of science and engineering. She claimed that the number of girls interested in these subjects is comparable to the number of boys until the late middle school years. She spoke of a few programs designed to maintain these girls’ interest into the collegiate levels. One of these programs is called the Toy Challenge, a contest for young men and women to design the best new toy. Information on this program can be found at www.ToyChallenge.com. Information on many other ways to develop and maintain interest in the sciences and more programs of interest can be found at www.SallyRideScience.com.

Ride encourages all those young women that are interested in scientific jobs to stick with it through the collegiate level.

“You don’t get dumber as you get older,” Ride said. “If you are good at it when you are young, you will always be good at it.

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