Sally Ride Quotes

I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals.

If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.

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.

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.

I never went into physics or the astronaut corps to become a role model. But after my first flight, it became clear to me that I was one. And I began to understand the importance of that to people. Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday. You can't be what you can't see.

All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Our future lies with today's kids and tomorrow's space exploration.

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

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

When you can feel that close to something you're used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.

We need to make science cool again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The most important steps that I followed were studying math and science in school. I was always interested in physics and astronomy and chemistry and I continued to study those subjects through high school and college on into graduate school. That's what prepared me for being an astronaut; it actually gave me the qualifications to be selected to be an astronaut.

Everywhere I go I meet girls and boys who want to be astronauts and explore space, or they love the ocean and want to be oceanographers, or they love animals and want to be zoologists, or they love designing things and want to be engineers. I want to see those same stars in their eyes in 10 years and know they are on their way!

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

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.

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

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!

I have been a bit of a risk-taker all my life.

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.

I can't remember a single time [my parents] ever told me not to do something I wanted to do.

The view of earth is spectacular from space. Most people imagine that when astronauts look out the window of the shuttle they see the whole earth like that big blue marble that was made famous by the flights that went to the moon. But the shuttle is much, much closer than those astronauts were. So we don't see the whole planet, the whole ball at once, we just see parts of it.

Different astronauts sleep in different ways.

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.

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!

The rockets light! The shuttle leaps off the launch pad in a cloud of steam and a trail of fire.

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

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.

Anything from making a mistake on an experiment that would ruin some scientist on earth's experiment - career, potentially - to doing something wrong with the satellite that a country was depending on for its communications, to making some mistake that could actually cost you and the crew either a mission or your lives. So there is a lot of pressure that's put on every astronaut to just make sure that he or she understands exactly what to do, exactly when to do it, and is trained and prepared to carry it out.

I did not come to NASA to make history.

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.

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.

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

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

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

So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.

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.

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

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.

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

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.