Remember When: The Sky Was Never the Limit

She was thirty-two years old, had a PhD in physics, and was told her whole life that space belonged to someone else.

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, launching aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-7. She didn't just break a barrier — she broke it in front of a nation that had been waiting twenty years for this moment.

NASA had first opened its astronaut program to women in 1978, and Ride was one of six selected from more than 8,000 applicants. She was brilliant, unflappable, and precise — a scientist and athlete who earned her seat on merit that was impossible to argue with. The press, however, had other priorities. Reporters asked if she would cry in space. Whether the controls were designed for her hands. She answered every question with a patience that itself required a kind of courage.

What the public didn't know — what Ride herself chose to keep private — was that she was also a queer woman. Her longtime partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, was revealed as such only in Ride's 2012 obituary. She never hid. She simply lived, fully and on her own terms, at a time when the world was not yet ready to fully receive her.

After leaving NASA, Ride spent her remaining years fighting to get more girls into science and math. She founded Sally Ride Science, believing that the pipeline to the stars had to start in the classroom — and that every girl deserved to see herself in it.

Forty-three years later, that fight is still ours. When this administration defunds education and sidelines science, we push back — the same way Sally Ride did. With evidence, with excellence, and without apology.