Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951 in Encino, California. She started playing tennis at age 10, and became an excellent tennis player. She won a tennis scholarship to Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles. After graduation in 1968 she attended Swarthmore College, but dropped out to pursue a career in professional tennis. After three months of hard practice, she decided she was not good enough to become a successful pro. She quit tennis and enrolled at Stanford University.

At 27, with B.A., B.S., and masters' degrees, she was a Ph.D. candidate looking for postdoctoral work in astrophysics when she read about NASA's call for astronauts in the Stanford University paper. More than 8,000 men and women applied to the space program that year. 35 were accepted, six of whom were women. She became one of the first six women to graduate from NASA’s space program.

Ride did extensive training after joining NASA in 1977 that included parachute jumping, water survival, gravity and weightlessness training, radio communications and navigation. She enjoyed flight training so much that flying became a favorite hobby. During the second and third flights of the space shuttle Columbia in November 1981 and March 1982, she served as communications officer, relaying radio messages from mission control to the shuttle crews. She was also assigned to the team that designed the remote mechanical arm, used by shuttle crews to set up and retrieve satellites.

In 1983, Dr. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space on the shuttle Challenger (STS-7). Her next flight was an eight-day mission in 1984, again on Challenger (STS 41-G). She experienced more than 343 total hours of space flight in her lifetime.

Ride was preparing for her third mission when Challenger exploded in 1986. When training was suspended, she was appointed to the Presidential Commission that was in charge of investigating the accident. She moved to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she became the assistant to the NASA administrator for long-range planning.

Dr. Ride retired from NASA in 1987 to become a Science Fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University. After two years, she was named Director of the California Space Institute and Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego where she pursued one of her heartfelt crusades, encouraging young women to study science and math.

In June, 1999 Ride joined space.com, a website about the space industry, as Executive Vice President and member of its Board of Directors. In September, 1999 she was named President of the company, a position she held until September, 2000.

After leaving space.com, Dr. Ride started and headed EarthKAM, an Internet-based NASA project that allows middle-school classes to shoot and download photos of the Earth from space. Her most recent enterprise is Imaginary Lines, an organization founded to provide support for all the girls who are, or might become, interested in science, math and technology. One instrument of this mission is the Sally Ride Club, created for upper elementary and middle school girls across the country.

Dr. Ride has received numerous awards, including the Jefferson Award for Public Service, the Women's Research and Education Institute's American Woman Award, and twice awarded the National Space Flight Medal. Dr. Ride was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame at Kennedy Space Center on June 21, 2003.

An advocate for improved science education, Ride has written and/or collaborated on five children's books, "To Space and Back", "Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System", "The Third Planet : Exploring the Earth from Space", "The Mystery of Mars", and "Exploring Our Solar System".

In 1987, Sally Ride resigned from NASA but she still works closely within the education and science field. She is the Director of the California Space Institute at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and she is a professor of Physics at the University of California at San Diego. Reflecting her English background, she also is co-author of a book entitled To Space and Back.

One of Sally Ride’s passions is encouraging young girls to take an interest in math and science related fields. She is a big supporter of women who pursue science related careers. If it weren’t for the choices that Sally Ride has made in her life, she wouldn’t be as successful as she is today. She would like to see more female participation in technical fields to ensure that women continue to make a positive impact in the careers of the future.

She is a former astronaut and the first American woman in space as a crewmember on Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. She was not, however, the first woman in space. She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. She was briefly married to NASA Astronaut Steve Hawley.