Sally Ride's Quotes

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

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

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

You know, I go around the country a lot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.

The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.

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

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.

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!

But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.

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

I've spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don't see why I should start now.

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

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

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.

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

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

So I decided on science when I was in college.

The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.

Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.

Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.

Different astronauts sleep in different ways.

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.

For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.

For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.

I did not come to NASA to make history.

I don't have any nicknames.

I had both male and female heroes.