Top 85 Sally Ride Quotes
#1. My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
Sally Ride
#2. It was a real honor for me to get to be the first woman astronaut. I think it's really important that young girls that are growing up today can see that women can be astronauts too. There have actually been a lot of women, who are astronauts, that that's a career that's open to them.
Sally Ride
#3. The best advice I can give anybody is to try to understand who you are and what you want to do, and don't be afraid to go down that road and do whatever it takes and work as hard as you have to work to achieve that.
Sally Ride
#4. 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.
Sally Ride
#5. The view of earth is absolutely spectacular, and the feeling of looking back and seeing your planet as a planet is just an amazing feeling. It's a totally different perspective, and it makes you appreciate, actually, how fragile our existence is.
Sally Ride
#6. 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.
Sally Ride
#7. The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
Sally Ride
#8. It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.
Sally Ride
#9. Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.
Sally Ride
#10. 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.
Sally Ride
#11. The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
Sally Ride
#12. If it wasn't for the women's movement, I wouldn't be where I am today.
Sally Ride
#13. We need to make science cool again.
Sally Ride
#14. I love the John Glenn model ... I may call NASA in 25 years or so, and see if they'd like to send me to Mars.
Sally Ride
#15. Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.
Sally Ride
#16. On both of my flights, everything went very well.
Sally Ride
#17. 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
#18. I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.
Sally Ride
#20. I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
Sally Ride
#21. When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.
Sally Ride
#22. 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.
Sally Ride
#23. I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
Sally Ride
#24. 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!
Sally Ride
#25. 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
#26. Our future lies with today's kids and tomorrow's space exploration.
Sally Ride
#27. You know, I go around the country a lot.
Sally Ride
#28. The thing I'll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In fact, I'm sure it was the most fun that I'll ever have in my life.
Sally Ride
#30. For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.
Sally Ride
#31. I suggest taking the high road and have a little sence of humour and let things roll off your back. I think that's very important.
Sally Ride
#32. 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
#33. The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
Sally Ride
#34. It's too bad our society isn't further along.
Sally Ride
#35. But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
Sally Ride
#36. Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
Sally Ride
#37. I did not come to NASA to make history.
Sally Ride
#38. I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
Sally Ride
#39. There are aspects of being the first woman in space that I'm not going to enjoy.
Sally Ride
#40. Ever been to Disneyland? That was definitely an E ticket!
Sally Ride
#41. You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.
Sally Ride
#42. I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
Sally Ride
#43. 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.
Sally Ride
#44. The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
Sally Ride
#45. Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.
Sally Ride
#46. 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
#47. If they asked me if I wanted to go into space tomorrow, I'd do it in a heartbeat. On the other hand, if they asked me if I wanted to go into training for three years and then go into space again, I'd probably say no.
Sally Ride
#48. It's well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they're in middle school.
Sally Ride
#49. 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
#50. There are lots of opportunities out there for women to work in these fields, ... Girls just need support, encouragement and mentoring to follow through with the sciences.
Sally Ride
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.
Sally Ride
#54. It's no secret that I've been reluctant to use my name for things.
Sally Ride
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I can't remember a single time [my parents] ever told me not to do something I wanted to do.
Sally Ride
#58. So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
Sally Ride
#59. When the space shuttle's engines cut off, and you're finally in space, in orbit, weightless ... I remember unstrapping from my seat, floating over to the window, and that's when I got my first view of Earth. Just a spectacular view, and a chance to see our planet as a planet.
Sally Ride
#61. 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
#62. I had both male and female heroes.
Sally Ride
#63. 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
#64. Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.
Sally Ride
#65. Three Secrets to Success: Be willing to learn new things. Be able to assimilate new information quickly. Be able to get along with and work with other people.
Sally Ride
#66. Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
Sally Ride
#67. I find myself looking around for other new, interesting opportunities to dive into.
Sally Ride
#68. But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.
Sally Ride
#69. One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.
Sally Ride
#70. I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life.
Sally Ride
#71. When you can feel that close to something you're used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.
Sally Ride
#72. 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.
Sally Ride
#73. The rockets light! The shuttle leaps off the launch pad in a cloud of steam and a trail of fire.
Sally Ride
#74. The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.
Sally Ride
#75. So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.
Sally Ride
#76. No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.
Sally Ride
#77. If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.
Sally Ride
#78. So I decided on science when I was in college.
Sally Ride
#79. All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
Sally Ride
#80. I've discovered that half the people would love to go into space and there's no need to explain it to them. The other half can't understand and I couldn't explain it to them. If someone doesn't know why, I can't explain it.
Sally Ride
#81. I think maybe it's too bad that our society isn't further along and this is such a big deal. I think it's time ... that people realize that women in this country can do any job they want to do.
Sally Ride
#82. 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
#83. I've spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don't see why I should start now.
Sally Ride
#84. On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.
Sally Ride
#85. Studying whether there's life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there's something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That's something that is almost part of being human, and I'm certain that will continue.
Sally Ride
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
