Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.
- Sally Ride Quote

But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.
- Sally Ride Quote

Different astronauts sleep in different ways.
- Sally Ride Quote

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.
- Sally Ride Quote

I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
- Sally Ride Quote

I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.
- Sally Ride Quote

I felt very honored, and I knew that people would be watching very closely, and I felt it was very, very important that I do a good job.
- Sally Ride Quote

I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
- Sally Ride Quote

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
- Sally Ride Quote

I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
- Sally Ride Quote

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.
- Sally Ride Quote

It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!
- Sally Ride Quote

My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
- Sally Ride Quote

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.
- Sally Ride Quote

On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
- Sally Ride Quote

On both of my flights, everything went very well.
- Sally Ride Quote

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.
- Sally Ride Quote

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
- Sally Ride Quote

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.
- Sally Ride Quote

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.
- Sally Ride Quote

The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.
- Sally Ride Quote

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.
- Sally Ride Quote

The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry - astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.
- Sally Ride Quote

The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
- Sally Ride Quote

The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
- Sally Ride Quote

Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
- Sally Ride Quote

We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.
- Sally Ride Quote

Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
- Sally Ride Quote

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.
- Sally Ride Quote