Sally Ride Quotes
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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.
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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.
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The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.
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All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
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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.
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For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.
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The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.
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So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
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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!
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There are aspects of being the first woman in space that I'm not going to enjoy.
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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.
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One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.
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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.
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On both of my flights, everything went very well.
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The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.
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There might be very primitive life in our solar system - single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won't know about that for a long time.
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But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.
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The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter.
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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.
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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.
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I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
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The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
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Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
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The view of Earth is spectacular.