Zitat des Tages von Sally Ride:
It's no secret that I've been reluctant to use my name for things.
So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
You know, I go around the country a lot.
All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
My parents must have done a great job. Anytime I wanted to pursue something that they weren't familiar with, that was not part of their lifestyle, they let me go ahead and do it.
Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.
For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.
I did not come to NASA to make history.
I have a lot of common sense. I know what needs to be done and how to approach it. I have an ability to work with people on large enterprises.
My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
I think it's important for little girls growing up, and young women, to have one in every walk of life. So from that point of view, I'm proud to be a role model!
When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.
The experience of being in space didn't change my perspective of myself or of the planet or of life. I had no spiritual experience.
Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.
Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.
NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts.
So I decided on science when I was in college.
I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help.
The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
I've spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don't see why I should start now.
Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.
For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
Different astronauts sleep in different ways.
On both of my flights, everything went very well.
There are aspects of being the first woman in space that I'm not going to enjoy.
Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.
On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.
The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.
Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds - compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.
I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.
