wives were very skittish about letting out as they are having this incredible public eye and spotlight shined into their lives. the program starts out in langley, va.. all of the families pack up and moved to virginia and the men start training and they are down in cape canaveral, florida and one of the most interesting things i learned just starting out in the book was how the cape, this sort of incredible men's playgrounds down there where there are working hard but also playing hard, was a no wives zone at first. going to the cape for a wife was totally off-limits. they weren't allowed to go out where the rockets took off from, all the wives would watch the early flights from the beach. at one point deke slayton's wife

marge said this is ridiculous. you are going into space. i can't go to the cape. what is going on out there? she tells him that he'd better drive her out there and he hides her under some blankets in the back of his car and they go past military guards and she gets out there and pops up her hat and it is sort of a lonely beach jetties and scrub brush and what not. the whole country is dying for a cigarette. this is the kind of spunk and irreverence that these women brought to this brave new world of being an astronaut wife. you have seven women, all different walks of life, allen sheppard's wife louise was very highbred. i think of her as the sabrina and audrey have removed character. she drew up as the gardener's daughter at longwould gardens and stayed on the east coast so

when she met jackie kennedy she almost treated jackie like she was an old friend, they were two private school girls almost, getting to know each other. you have this band forming, these women are in the public eye and they don't know how to deal with it at first so they start giving each other words of advice. if a reporter asks you, something you don't know anything about, don't worry, just say it is classified. one of my favorite stories, because a lot of the inspiration for writing the book came out of these technicolor looking photographs from life magazine because the wives were on the cover of life dozens of times from 1959-1972 at the end of the apollo program. the wives have their first cover shoot and they will be clustered

around this mercury capsule, which when you see it today at the smithsonian, this thing looks really flimsy, you can understand why its nickname was the can and you can understand how terrifying it would be to have your spouse ride in that thing especially since many of the early test launches had gone absolutely haywire with explosions and things just not going right until the last minute but the women are told by life and nasa that they are to where these proper pastel, the epitome of the perfect american housewife, so they set this tradition of the round robin phone call which will last throughout the space race and calling each other, i you going to wear that? what color lipstick you going to where? and they decide to wear pink lipstick and everyone will wear

a shirt waist dress except for run a carpenter, scott carpenter's life. usable character, intellectual, a really independent woman who will end up hosting her own feminist talk show in the mid 70s and looking sort of gloria steinem like in the dresses and skirts but she says according to the other wives i am not going to let the government tell me what to wear. we are astronaut wives now. our husbands are civilians, they are no longer military, so she shows up to the photo shoot and she is wearing this cocktail dress, big red roses and red high heels and of course other wives are sort of aghast. she makes the shot so you have that melding of personalities coming together. stuff of course the men, meanwhile, they are becoming rock stars. everything that goes along with it.

they are getting $1 corvettes which they can trade in every year and get a new one. alan shepard get the snazzy white corvette. they're getting $1 a night hotel rooms at the holiday inn. this is down in cocoa beach which is space city, lit up with all sorts of neon signs, moons and stars and intergalactic fanfare. the women actually come down to cocoa beach for a lady's weekend and jo schirra remembered walking into the lobby of the holiday inn and two women, the astronaut crew piece who come with the adorable name of cape cookies, fall to their knees in front of her astro not, her husband. what is going on here?

so you have throughout the space race, having to maintain this semblance of everything is fine at home, of course my husband, i am sure this goes home for the holiday, as soon as he finishes work. meanwhile of course there are all sorts of tabloid headlines coming out and everything. the space program moved to houston in 1962. i had a lot of fun learning about this whole area known as togethersville. this makes nonfiction writing so tantalizing. this was the space verbs' where all the astronauts and wives moved. it is almost like beverly hills of spacemen. there were tour buses that would wind their way through the streets of these little subdivisions where john and

annie glenn lived next to scott carpenter and his wife renee, where betty grissom and jo schirra lived a few streets down, where the media attention on these families was so acute that renee and jo had doorway built in between there two yards which they called the rabbit hole and that they could scurry back and forth between during a flight so the press wouldn't see them. astronaut kids were chased down the halls of the holiday inn when they went to visit and were always told not to open the door to many reporters because they had this exclusive agreement with life magazine. one anecdote one of the astronaut kids shared with me that i always have fun remembering is daring apollo levon, that flight, the wives first of all, janet armstrong, pat collins, buzz aldrin's wife

joan, had to hide in back seats of neighbors cars, go to the beauty parlor, the grocery store, there was a media circus on their suburban lawns. at one point of michael collins's kid opened the door and they were given a present of a panda bear, two journalists from china handing them this caddy bear, oh wow, this is great. turned out there was a microphone hidden inside its stomach. this kind of marx brothers relationship with cat and mouse game with the press and the wives. as one of the wives put it, she said our lives were composed of highs and lows, and what is so remarkable about this group of women is how down-to-earth they maintained sort of their

personalities. they were strongly patriotic. they felt they were given sort of an equal task in supporting their husband's mission into the stars. they were going to do everything they could to support the country's effort to support their husbands even when it meant tucking things in the backs of the worse, emotional things to deal with for later, sweeping things under the rug. as i mentioned they were living in an almost truman show existence, no divorce was actually allowed within nasa until 1967 when it erupted in the first space divorce. the women had to rely on each other. the men were away at cape canaveral, flying their teeth 38s to florida monday morning, they would not return until friday night when they would fly their planes down low over togethersville and rattle the

houses. that was some of the astronauts's way of saying hi, honey, i am home. put the rose in the oven. your astronaut is home. i recently went back to togethersville with some of the women and went into sue bean, alan bean's first wife, looking at the pool and alan bean who was the fourth man to walk in the route moon with pete conrad on apollo 12 did this mosaic bar with the ignacio zamora insignia and sue was very beautiful, blond, texan, looking out over the pool and said buzz and joan used to live over there and the bass ats were over there. thists were over there. thisets were over there. this was a really swinging place. the wives and 60s for the astronauts' wives club which would meet once a month to

support each other and get to know each other. these were monthly tea and coffee events. fabulous scenes that are not reproduced in women's gathering today because times have changed, doubled as and over crowing -- overflowing ashtrays and martini hours and just sort of being there to support each other and going through something very few will ever experience. the way the wives don't with the pressure was very different. you have the pressure of your husband and the pressure of the media. and the most dreaded moment, even more than the possibility of something going wrong on the launch pad, was opposed flight press conference. this was the moment when all the

wives would have to walk out on their suburban lawn, face the cameras and give a statement and receiving very little formal coaching from nasa besides what they heard back in their air force and navy days which was feed your husband a good breakfast of steak and eggs so he doesn't get white headed up in the air. these women were basically just told to act picture-perfect and so they did this send up together and ran a carpenter who i mentioned, glamorous and outspoken, blond, came up with this 1-woman show and called it released a land that was her send the name of the esteban wives and she was married to squarely stable, her perfect astronaut husband. they had their perfect astronaut

children and their dog smiley and she said whenever reporter asks you tell them you are happy, fraud and thrilled, throughout the decade whenever the wives are asked how they are feeling, when their husbands were up there, in space, being blasted into space, they often say, happy, proud and frills. and of course reporters are tearing their hair out. we want to deal -- to hear how you feel but back then it wasn't -- they really weren't able to put the feeling into words. they were scared of revealing too much in this highly competitive environment. if i show my fear is like my husband maybe he will be bumped from the flight. marilyn lovell, married to jim lovell, a wonderful couple to this day, he was played by tom hanks and apollo 13. when he was going into space on

one of his gemini flights, marilyn found out she was pregnant and she hid her pregnancy from jim for a few months which is pretty remarkable until he finally found out and she said i am sorry, i didn't want you to get bumped from the flight. cheese said good idea, we should keep it secret for a longer. this is just a taste of the astrowives lives. i would like to open up the discussion to questions now because it is such a rich topic and i could talk a little more about what it was like going into these historic figures's living rooms and what it was like getting to know them as well. if anyone has questions, please do line up.

>> in your book, you talk about one of the episodes on one of the lunar landings where the camera didn't work and there was virtually sort of a cover-up because they didn't want to show that. i wonder if you could go into that. >> one of the most exciting things, of course, about walking on the moon, being on the moon for the guys and everybody watching back at home, that was what was so incredible about the apollo program. even for someone like me who is one of the wives once asked me when i went to interview her, where were you when we landed on the moon? how old were you? i said jo, i think i was moon dust. i wasn't born yet. whenever you become fascinated with this subject, you can go there with the guys. all you have to do is look at the youtube footage, television

footage they filmed. the incident you were just talking about was apollo 12, the second mission to the moon. alan bean had this television cameras a burgling to use to chronicle their journey and he by accident turned it into the sun, so it was burned out. the only transmission they were able to share with the public in real-time was the voices of the astronauts which are going into the wives's homes versus on the squawk boxes which are these baby intercom like space-age device is all the wives had at home but the networks are flipping out. we are not going to get our moon footage and we had big swaths of time allowed for it. what they did was nasa had some mockups of the moon where the guys would practice going

through their routines for when they were up there so they outfitted some actors in space suits and had them sort of manic what pete conrad and alan bean or beeano as his friends call him or doing on the moon and it has only fuel the conspiracy theories that anyone who has anything to do with nasa including the wives think are absolutely ludicrous. i would like to tell you all how i came to write this book and a little bit about getting to know these women today. of course i am a writer, i live in new york with my husband who is also a writer, in the front row. our lives are composed on a daily level of thinking about stories, thinking about ideas for great stories. this isn't something you can manufacture.

inspiration has to hit. i have to admit at that time i was quite into the show madmen, we were having a carrot -- a tv marathon watching it and i love the 60s time period, my grandmother used to wear pulitzer dresses, we just bought this big soda book of the moon landings with the norman mailer text of a fire on the moon. and i was looking through these pictures of neil armstrong on the lunar surface, buzz aldrin and his sort of marshmallow space suit and just having sort of a tomboy moment because these are pretty male heroic images, until i turn a page and i am hit with this burst of color. ..

and a sort of continue to support each other through triumph and tragedy. one of the sweetest things about the connection of the wives is many of them when i met them they wore a little gold bracelets with a tiny golden whistle on it and that's one of their symbols we will be there

for you and it was a matter of winning over these women's trust. they were always very protective of nasa, of their husbands even if they were later after their husbands back from the moon divorced because astronauts and their wives did divorce after the apollo program and i see it as a casualty of the incredible amount of pressure that was on these families to come for them and tform andto just work aroune rigorous hours. out of 30 couples only seven marriages survived. so in many ways as they pointed out, there relationships have endured longer than the marriages. it outlasted them as well. there were people that were more difficult to get to know their

mothers. at the beginning everyone was sort of whistling is betty going to talk to you? i don't think that he is going to talk to you. she doesn't come to our meetings and so i was nervous because she was someone important to talk to and sure enough i got a lovely letter from her. she doesn't talk on the phone much because of her hearing that she said when you come to houston please come to my home and it was one of these interviews that i expected it to be about two hours and when we went back to her house about 10:00 at night i told her i think i should go to the hotel and get some sleep and come back tomorrow morning. and she was just fun loving andd honest and had the kind of memory she would've plucked out conversations that she had back in the day.

they were high school sweethearts like many of the astronauts and their wives. her story is a tragic one. of course during the mercury program, his capsule thinks so he is given a bad rap for that position of his and from the early days of course way men always had to deal with the pressure of what if he doesn't come back. which is you don't talk about the danger especially with your husband coming to don't talk about the danger with your friends because it was seen as a james many of them have superstitions and my favorite woman i got to know during the project had a superstition i think we can all probably relates to which is pete's pillow had to be perfectly

smooth on his site of the bed in his closet door had to be closed because if she did it, she felt like something wrong could happen and this is just a reflection of the fear these women had to digest and live with. goss always told betty that he didn't like her wearing black and she felt the only time you should ever wear black was to a funeral and purposefully she didn't end up wearing black to his funeral people to listen to something happens to me i want you to have a party. so early on she promised him, she said okay i will have a party. he is one of the men that died during the apollo fire, and this was the first large-scale tragedy when the men perish in a capsule it catches fire on the

ground and this is a very revealing part of what these men went through because it was excruciating. the way that they reported was relatively new lows in the official man always had to tell the wife her closest friends are always called before tuesday something bad has happened out there. i want you to go to her house right now that the women knew they were not allowed to use say anything they just had his agent told the official word could arrive, so very difficult. in the case of petty end o betto other wives in the fire, debbie ended up saving nasa's -- sueing nasa's and as a result she was

basically ostracized from together as bill by the other astronauts and the astronauts lives for not touting the party line for going against the company organization. pat weitz was a tragic story. she never really got over her husband after apollo one and when they were planning a reunion years later she actually committed suicide and they saw her as a final tragedy of the apollo one fire. so a lot of heartache in this story. but just incredible american moments that were not seen as necessarily input to report back

then because we were not as focused on the fact as behind every great man is a great form in or behind every moonwalk or there is a strong woman waiting on earth and it is just a whole another sort of constellation perspective on what it took to get to the moon. do we have any of your questions? >> it could be your next book three of how do the children fare in that kind of upbringing? >> as i talked to many of the kids it was sort of growing up in the cradle of the american dream, green lawns, a pool that was shaped like the space capsules like the -- the kids

almost remember fondly those were the days our mother would lock us out of the house and they don't come home until dinner. you are giving me a headache and it was great because we would ride our bikes and go to the pool and that is sort of the memory. but i think it's difficult having a father who is a hero but often and absentee father because they wer were a way trag so often. one of the kids remembered it was sort of strange. it was like a dad wouldn't be home a lot suddenly he would be very end of the magazine would be there and we would be doing a photo shoot out on the swing. we never did this in real life. it's probably at a lot of kids

in hollywood at the old place now. their lives were made almost reality shows so there was dealing with that and i will share one more funny anecdote which is the wives were always sort of kidding and complaining they had to drag their kids into watch the space launches, johnny would rather be watching star trek. but within your dad is doing some important stuff. well my best friends dad is an astronauastronaut and lives acre street, those are engineers over there, and this was the world that was normal to them and the wives tried very hard to keep normal and grounded. >> you kind of you who do to help their lives changed after the program and i was wondering if you could share their thoughts on what was it like when that ended? do they feel like it should continue and like there was a

sense among these families at that point? everyone was sad when mixing ended the program and these wives who i see today and i think in history they will continue to be seen and i've told this to them as a sort of pioneer space women. they were the pioneers. their husbands were doing something we had never done before. just the moments of going out in your backyard as jane conrad remembered when her house .-full-stop there walking around on the moon and she -- the house just cleared out and she had all of the wives over for a party about 5:30 in the morning she wandered out by the pool and just look a looked at the moon t of stared at it and i think we can all think this when we look at the mood like we went up

there as a country and as human beings. but she said she remembered when she was a little girl how she used to look forward to man in the moon and she said this is trippy. my husband is the man in the moon and for this one moment she had this mystical feeling of clarity. this is the late 60s. people are into that. she said it basically vanished in a moment and then she was going back inside to do the dishes. but to get back to justify fallout after the apollo program, i think the most prominent example is looking at buzz aldrin and his wife. like many they had a hard time coming back from the moon after the families and the crew members into their lives would

go on these fabulous tours especially after apollo 11 they went all over the world presenting moon rocks and little cases to the clean of thing cleg going, etc., the heads of state and while they were on this tour she shared her diary with me that she kept and she starts seeing buzz spiraling out of control. he's been outspoken about his own alcoholism and depression he built with after coming back from the moon and that is something that changed her life. they ended up getting a divorce and they have three kids. she has an entry in her diary i think our lives will return to normal and he looked at her and said i've been to the moon. nothing is ever going to be the same. and i think that is true for a

lot of the families. >> you mentioned how you flipped a page in a magazine and a story came to life. if you have a moment at the end of the red leather and i hear -- diary what caused you to flip their? cynic i will save that for the moment and please -- >> i haven't read the book yet but i look forward to reading it. i don't know the ages of the women that you are referring to but in your research, did the idea come up with a conversation about the commercialization of space travel and would any of them ever consider the galactic would they do that themselves? to ask about going into space back in the six he sispa and

lots of time with life magazine of course, if you have these articles about we are going to be putting up a couple of the astronaut had this sort of crackpot scheme and root beer stands when we colonized, so yes someone like a former tough marine said i would have gone up there in a heartbeat and the early pilot who ended up flying in the powder puff derby she would have been there in a moment but some of them are like are you kidding i want to stay down here with my feet on the ground and of course they all hope we will continue to explore and push the envelope as their husband used to say. i will just mention very deeply

the red leather diary, my first book because i think it reflects on how i wanted to talk this kind of story. i grew up in chicago. and it was a new york guy in a city girl. i was in new york with that density of people walking around looking at these old buildings into these windows lit up and i just sort of naïve, just to be an incredible amount of untold stories but there are and how everybody has a story and somehow i just wanted to be able to reveal some of those distant stars. so very serendipitously i have to say i feel quite lucky.

but strange things happen to me or maybe i see the world in a different way. i notice things that seem almost fear a tale -- fairy tale. i came out after i graduated and i was working as a news clerk at "the new york times" which is like the devil wears prada that without the prada with lots of bow ties and the businessmen who would give me bits of advice. i wanted to be a novelist to which i going to return to for my next project, which is going to be fiction. i came out of the building and there was something too good to resist pus push with the dumpstr and not an ordinary because it was filled with about 50 old trunks into these were the old kinds that were brought on the titanic from paris and the

french line. i am not a dumpster diver by trade but i love vintage clothing and a good story so it's eight in the morning and i literally climb on top of that is to and i start -- you are all looking at the very odd. i started going through these dresses in the collections of handbags and among the urban treasure with a red leather diary kept from a woman from 1921 to 1934 at the height of the depression and a long fairy tale short i ended up tracking down the owner is 90 with the help of a private investigator and befriending her. she wanted to be a writer and she hosted a literary salon, she was a renaissance woman who had

love affairs in her story spoke to me so much i ended up telling this story of how this comical made the way back to her and it was sort of given as a gift to the rest of the world. telling the forgotten story was very interesting to me. little things i remember from professors the good stories are often little margins were footnotes. it's not the typical heroic model but it's the other side of the coin and it was that desire and hunger to tell the story that is an untold stor story but there's also this sort of emotional catharsis for the

subject that has been under the radar revealed to the world and i know from speaking to the boys not only does this book take them back in time but they feel very gratified that people care about their story. i don't think many of them call themselves heroes because they were so in support of their husbands and would have seen that as arrogant and inappropriate, but i certainly see them as heroines myself, and i think they have the right stuff. [laughter] [applause]

this is 45 minutes. >> so on to their reason why you are all here. this evening i am so pleased to welcome lynn sherr to discuss her new biography of sally ride. think we're all pretty familiar with the public persona of sally ride. many young women, myself included, grew up wanting to be just like her. thanks to this new book we can feel like we knew her better than ever. the book really shows a more personal side while still showing a well-known and compelling detail that is sally

ride story. the book clearly benefits from access to family and friends and their corporations and research. just some really nice in a test to share dividend, of course, ms. lynn sherr herself as a longtime journalist with abc news will she covered a variety of topics including the nasa space shuttle program. we are so glad she is here tonight and will start off with a quick video. first, join me in welcoming her to politics and prose. [applause] >> this is for all of my tv pals, abc france, done by the publisher. this is among their early forays into video. actually, i am very pleased with the way it turned out. is just about five minutes long. ♪ >> i'm lynn sherr, and this is history in sight.

i am going to tell you five incredible things about sally ride america's first woman in space. [inaudible conversations] >> on july 20th to 1969 : neil armstrong became the first human tests at his footprint. >> one small step for man. >> a teenager back on earth was a much the untold billions watching closely that night that had no idea that she too would one day make cosmic history. ♪ >> sally was a baby boomer born in 1951, a valley girl from encino, a los angeles suburb who was ranked junior tennis player faugh. after college she realized she did not have what it took and joked that what captor from turning pro was before hand. sally was fascinated by science

and, specifically astrophysics, the physics of astronomy. blessed by people who encouraged a scientific passion. ♪ >> my four and. sally was fascinated by science, specifically astrophysics, the physics and astronomy. blessed with teachers and has climbed college who encouraged her scientific passion and confided in her best friend that she wanted to be famous by winning the nobel prize. and sally never considered a career because she did not think women would be eligible to fly. it was only in 1977 when nasa spread a wide net to recruit

women and minorities that selig get interested. >> i want to get up as soon as i can. i don't have any great desire to be the first woman. ♪ some one. >> seller was not the first woman to space. in 1963 and '82. and in 1978 sally became one of the first six women chosen to train with nasa astronauts. and i don't mind people asking me questions about what i'm going to do. further, someone who expects that the only reason i am flying is because he needs someone to serve and coffee. >> sees well qualified to be here. >> she and her colleagues trendy sector the same as the men to

mop parasailing into shark infested wallet -- waters, practicing a parachute landings and get totally hooked on flying >> is nothing had rather be doing right now. what i want to do is fly as many times as there will let me. >> and then after four years of training nasa selected sally to be the first american woman to fly. >> i feel there is some pressure for me to not mess up. >> it made her an instant celebrity. >> how did you respond? how do you take it as a human being? to you wait, do you -- what do you do? >> why doesn't anybody ask. [laughter] ♪ >> ten, nine, eight, seven, six,

five, four, we have -- >> she was 32 on june 18th 1983 when she lifted off with challenger. >> america's first woman astronaut. >> immense power of the rocket pushing her off the earth. half a million people lined the causeway sharing ride, sally, right. and then their restorer. during the seven day flight celotex in the view from the shuttle's was up to five window. >> being able to put on a pressure suit and open match and step outside. essentially the universe of the front of him. >> especially riveted by the

thin client of earth's atmosphere. that's all there was she would later say. it is so clear from that perspective how fragile our resistances. sally ride was my friend for 30 years. while i thought i knew her well, i really only learned about her by writing his bare feet. she was a fiercely private individual who avoided public appearances when she could and always preferred the company of one or two people to a crowd. sally was a superb compartmentalizes. she wants to control the narrative of her own life. in an era when a muscle charlie was not widely accepted she kept her sexual orientation private. while at nasa she was married to a fellow astronaut, a bond that lasted for five years. she then into the relationship with another woman for more than a quarter century. she never talked about her life, never came out publicly.

supported her decision to reveal their partnership after her death from pancreatic cancer and 20 to off. so who is sally ride? a toddler who saw ourself as an educator, she wanted mills gold rose to feel the excitement that she had felt, and a challenge match the thrill of watching the neurons fire and a young girl's brain when she learned about science. especially intrigued by the possibility by the planet mars. the children that there would be the ones to step foot there. that will be cool. that will be very cool. >> i was very honored that nasa chose me to be the first woman. it is time that people realize that women in this country can do any job that they want to do.

>> sally ride. i hope you all are aware that it was this past week that was the 31st anniversary of sally's flight. she took off -- she landed yesterday 31 years ago exactly. so we are celebrating an anniversary which is very exciting. thank you all for being here and think you particularly to all my abc france. my goodness, so many people. it's great. thank you for coming. letting me tell you some more about this terrific woman who was somebody i covered and was somebody who was my friend. i will tell you that her name is now attached to an number of important things. several schools around the country, an impact crater on the

moon, and other space science venture and soon a ship, a research vessel will be called the sally ride. and scientists will be able to look beneath floor exactly the kinds of things she was seeing up in the sky. posthumously she was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by president obama. in her lifetime she plays herself in an episode of the tv show touched by an angel. she throughout the first pitch at a world series game. she was regularly beg to run for office, and the office and often asked to be the nasa administrator. she turned them all down. wait too private to take such a public job. plus sally grew up and lived most of her life in southern california in the perfect climate of southern california. and none of her -- when one of her nasa colleagues said terror during one change of a administration, but would it take to be used take the job of

nasa administrator? she said, if they moved to california. she was also funny and mischievous. the thing is, her real name was indeed it sally ride. i mean, how does that happen? but she was not the inspiration for the rocket "mustang sally" with this wonderful course. indeed, the she used to say that she ran from that saw her entire life or any of you at the launch ? my absolute favorite sign at the kennedy space center was along the strip in cocoa beach there was a restaurant -- excuse me, a bank that had a huge marquee that said ride sally ride and you guys can tagalong to. much more to our liking was being acknowledged by billy

joel in his song we did not like the fire were he listed the 56 historic figures are mormons over the past 40 years to celebrate his own birthday periods to can between wheel of fortune and heavy-metal suicide. and sally actually -- the song and shot to the top of the billboard hot 100. she heard it oradio for the first time in nearly drove off a cliff. billie jean king told me that she heard it for the first time and that every time she would hear this song she still turns up the volume so she can catch her name. i do, too. so why all the tributes and the fuss? i want to just start with a cartoon beavis this as -- when sally died two years ago of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61 there were a number of political cartoons in the papers paying tribute. most of them would show a

constellation in the sky shaped with her initials or the woman cymbal or never, but this is the one that i really liked. it is a picture, a teenage girl's bedroom. on the walls are pictures of space shuttles and rocket ships. on the shelves are textbooks and astrophysics test -- textbooks. surprisingly neat bedroom. sitting there with her ponytail looking at the tv monitor pcs they, the computer monitor. and on the computer monitor is sally's obituary. 19512012. and standing before her it is for mom. and the growth is talking to her mom. what she says, wait, are you saying there was a time when there weren't any women *? yes, indeed. this is really what her

story is about. this is why she is so important. sally did not grow up with astronaut dreams. she wanted to be a scientist a tennis player. when that did not work out and was right back to science. she was totally committed to being a scientist, was quite sure she would be an academic all of her life and do research. and one day she went to stanford, got her undergraduate, master's, and ph.d. and in january of 1977 she is finishing her last year of a phd thesis. she goes to the stanford student union in order to five shifts a cup of coffee and doughnut to wake up before she goes to class. she says down and picks up a copy of the stanford daily. there above the fold as an article, big headlines the says nasa to recruit one.

celeries the article, raise the requirements -- an application. this is the one who was dead set on being an academic. she totally new what she was going to do for the rest of her life. she pivots, turns on a dime and a totally changed to life. some 25,000 people also sentence for that particular application. a little over 8,000 actually applied. 1500 women. sally was chosen a year later along with 34 other people. they were the first class of astronauts chosen just for the space shuttle program. and what was so unusual

about it, as i said, is that for the first time nasa was not only willing to allow women and minorities in the program, but they actually reached out for them. in the beginning of space program was about men, they were very brave, very smart, very accomplished. they did breakfast things. but they all had to offer the most part, military backgrounds, all of them. in the very beginning of them have military backgrounds was slick because president eisenhower in the beginning set in 1958 in response to the soviet sputnik satellite that had been lost of rare going to do a human spaceflight program we want to fast track it and therefore we need to get individuals who already have training in know how fly jets. to understand danger and are already vetted for security reasons.

there was no reason whatsoever that women could not math on. they chose to do it the other way. and so for the first nearly quarter-century that is really what it was. after the last man left the men in 1972 we then had skylab, the program with the soviets are now becoming more friends. but it was not until we had the space shuttle which was a different kind of spacecraft that they could actually reach out for more individuals. the reason was, in part, because this bill shuttle was like a plane. it was much bigger than a capsule that had taken our men to the moon. john glenn used to joke that you did not really get into a space capsule, you put it on. there were really small. now we have the space plane, the shuttle, which can handle crews of seven, eight, nine, lots of people. there are looking for more individuals and are also looking for women and minorities because what they really want at is scientists

this is where she finally got a chance. so now she has chosen to be an astronaut. this is quite an amazing thing for her. she was very private. she was absolutely an introvert. there is that myers briggs psychology scale. on one side of the eyes and the other side of the ease. 100 percent on the eyesight. did not react much to anything. very cool under pressure. but when she got the call in january of 1978 saying that she had made it she jumped up and down screaming, was so excited, called upper best friend in the picture to whom she said want to win the nobel prize, calls upper friend to answers. she says, hi, this is your friendly local astronaut calling. that is the way she identified herself.

her parents shared the glory in their own idiosyncratic way. a father who took -- top political science at a community college in santa monica, saleh said being an astronaut just solved my dad's problem. when i said i would be an astrophysicist he had not a clue how to explain to his friends what i did. now that i am an astronaut it's fine. her mother spun it differently. oh, well, one of them will get to heaven. before she got there is sally learned that being elevated to the astronaut corps also meant facing a press corps was very little imagination. this is january of 1978. to russian women have flown. we know almost nothing about them. now there are six women being named to the astronaut corps. so sally, the academic, as

stanford coast air first press conference, never in her life into one. she was subject questions like are you afraid of being in orbit with all those men. and then we have, do you expect to run into any reference. she calmly answered no and assured the former better academic career as an astrophysics in have made her comfortable. we first met in 1981 when abc as regina team covering the then upcoming special program those of you obviously remember we had a great team, and anchor man who had covered all of the apollo and that jim and i and mercury flights. very, very knowledgeable. he was terrific. we have a science correspondent who practically invented the field who could not be beat. they wanted someone else. i described my addition to the team as the colored guy

in the baseball book. i was there to do the feature story in the sideline things. for a variety of reasons i wound up anchoring everything up until the challenger explosion. it was a great assignment. but my very first assignment or my first trip to the johnson space center in houston was to do a story on the so-called new breed of astronauts, these mission specialists or no longer in a hot shot pilots. sally was one of the people that gave us the interview. the two of us just hit it off instantly. i like term manner, her sense of humor, the fact that she spoke english and not techno talk and the fact that she acknowledged unequivocally that she would not be there if it were not for the women's movement. she did not do this alone. this was something that had taken a lot of social pressure. i also asked her at one point in my first interview

in 1981 why should one to go in the space. i was expecting one of these cocky responses and none of these canned responses. sally said, i don't know it. i have discovered that have the people who would love to go into space, and there is no need to explain it to them, but on the other hand, if someone can't understand i can't explain it to them. if someone doesn't know why i can't explain it which i thought was quite refreshing in this paternity of white male fighter pilot jocks. as a program developed and i wound up anchoring abc coverage we spent a lot of time together on an over cold shrimp and funny stories and a variety of dives including one that promised month wrestling on friday nights that we managed to avoid. when she married her fellow astronauts their home became my beer and pizza hangout during of the people's missions. sally got her big chance five years later, five years

after she got to nasa. and i think she was the right choice. any one of the six women would have done a sprout. they are all very talented, very accomplished, they all would have been terrific. i really think she was the right choice for a variety of reasons. staring, an optimist, trained and -- and leslie to answer questions tirelessly. all of that attention on her was very trying and it did culminate in what i do believe is the single dumbest question ever asked of anyone at any press conference in or. i have been a lot of press conferences during the question that you saw in the video that was asked by a fellow from time magazine who at the final preflight press conference actually said, what happens when there's a problem? do you weep? there was a gasp from the audience as there was in

this room. i was sitting -- there were a lot. what is extraordinary, and use our reaction, and she responded. she did not go for the guy's eyes, san nasty, horrible thing. she laughed, smiled, turns to rick, the pilot of her crew and says, why doesn't anyone ever ask correct these questions and defuses the entire thing. it was absolutely brilliant. i am sure that nasa was high fighting itself, the managers in the back room. another male reporter actually asked her, did you ever wish you were born. she gritted her teeth. i have seen the video. no, i never thought about it . within nasa there were a few other hurdles. when sally was chosen she suddenly had to make a lot of decisions about things like what kind of things would go in the personal

approach is it that they took along. she was smart enough to immediately bring in the other five women and say, we're doing this as a group. she knew that any decision she made was going to devolve on the next in the next and the next. so they did manage to get the old spice after shave lotion and the british sterling dealer replaced by some more female friendly lotions and potions. and they also managed to get nasa to get would only nasa could refer to as her restraints. recall and armbands. but it was not just nasa or the press. when the original launch date was moved back a couple of months to accommodate a schedule change johnny carson joke on the tonight show that the space shuttle had been delayed so that sally ride could get a purse to match your shoes. i have screened all of the johnny carson jokes.

they only got worse. there were awful, frat house banks. i am happy to tell you that the audience overtime ignored him and then started booing him. the idea of an american woman in space have gone from becoming a priceline to a matter of national pride. the entire nation was riding with sally when she lifted off in june of 1983. just before she went i got my 1-on-1 interview, the one the ec in the video. and i asked for, look, do you feel under any special pressure because you are the first american moment? and she said, yes, i do. i feel pressure not to mess up. what she meant was she felt pressure not to mess up her crew. in the space mission is a group effort, and it is a team event. she wanted to do well for the crew. she wants to do well for the mission. she won a to do well for nasa. she wants to do well for the united states, and she

wanted to do well for the future of human spaceflight. overall i think she wanted to do well for women because she understood that if she messes up, return, that it would be said that no one can ever fly again because one woman must up. she understood that if she did well that would open the door for the rest. and listen to this, and from a female astronaut from a later generation, a woman by the name of pamela mall right here not only flew but commanded the space shuttle, one of the few women to have done that. here is what she says. it was not until after i became an astronaut and discovered the most important gift that sally gave me, she was tremendously confident. the reputation of everyone who comes after you depends on how well you do. she opened those doors and smoothed the path for all women because she was good and what she did. i think that is the secret of why this mission was so important and why her choice

was so critical. she was also, i will tell you, not only good but playful. the night before the launch of the afternoon before sally was -- her picture was on every magazine cover, the most famous person on the planet. every reporter at the kennedy space center wanted to see her command of your. astronauts are put in quarantine for a couple of days before they fly so that we don't give them any stray germs that could really screw up the mission. sally was in quarantine. everyone wanted to know how she was. there was just a lid on the whole thing. i am sitting in our abc news workspace which was a trailer. the day before working on my script. the phone rings. someone picks it up and says it's for you. this low voice of the other and says hi.

what are you doing in five minutes. i don't know. what am i doing. walk outside your trailer, turn left, it down the gravel path and stop. i did that, and there was sally in costa my t-shirt, flip-flops' planning against a car 25 yards away and waving at me. when she was doing was saying she was number one pushing the envelope a little bit because of royals were no contact with the press. sally understood that she could do things her way a little bit without really breaking the rules. she also wanted me to see that she was smiling and happy and wanted to give me something to report that i on-air, and she was doing well. this is the way that i actually remember best. so off she goes on that beautiful gorgeous june morning. they had a perfect flight, an absolutely perfect flight and one of my stand up closes that week said

technologically nasa is pushing toward the 21st century, but in human terms it has finally entered the 20th. and i did have a little trouble getting that stand up through. i also took my mother to launch. pushing 80. and loved it. afterwards she said it was perfect. i saw the horse and buggy, the airplane, now this. it felt really good. when they landed a week later at edwards air force base in california president reagan telephoned his congratulations and said, somebody said that sometimes the best man for the job as a woman. you were there because you were the best person for the job, which i think is absolutely true. millions of people around the world agree, particularly women, particularly young men. they translated her journey into their own ticket to success. and the thinking was, if she can do that i can do

anything. weather's getting out of the typing pool or getting in the medical school or whenever many women wanted to do, this really opens the door for an awful lot of women. sally had a wonderful time. she worked hard. one of the things that she did is what all astronauts do, when things got a little slow, which was rare, she would drift over to the window and went back to earth. and that image that she saw of earth with the atmosphere totally changed to life. she said it was as if someone had taken no royal blue crayon and drawn a line around the earth. sometimes she changed the metaphor to say that line is as thin as the faa's on the tennis ball or it was the earth's spacesuit. and that is our atmosphere, the only thing protecting us from the harsh reality of our space. without that atmosphere none of us would be here. we could not survive. that is when she began to

understand the fragility of the planet we live on and directed a huge amount of her life toward giving science and government and children interested in doing something about protecting the errors. that was just the beginning of her contribution to the planet and to nasa. after the challenger explosion she served on the rogers commission which investigated that. as it turns out, she became the source, an early source of the critical revelation about the o-rings and their contribution to the accident and also to the flawed management decisions that were made. nasa essentially shut down to repair the system and reconfigure the program. selling moved here to washington where she undertook a major study at nasa headquarters to help determine the future of the space agency.

that is the one in which she recommended first something called mission to planet earth which was treating earth as an exotic plant the same way we look at mars and venus and everything else out there and a spending some of our vast energy and wisdom on fixing what is going on here, not only before but at the same time as we are going other places. this was a huge step forward over the years she served on other commissions and also on the investigative commission when the columbia disintegrated in 2003 on reentry tariff. she was the only shuttle astronauts to serve on both commissions and made a huge contribution to that one also. once she was the bright new face of nasa and now she became its conscience. she really cared about the space agency, wanted to fix it when something went wrong. later in life she worked with nasa on many, many

projects. she got them to put a camera in space. first on the shuttle and then on the space station. and hooked in with kids' classrooms so that youngsters could sit in a classroom, punch buttons, and take pictures of parts of the earth that they wanted to study. and when someone else was sending of satellites to do research should put a camera on the satellites and get kids in school to be able to take pictures. she was always giving back. this is what she wanted to. and that is what she was building up to. being first was fine, but she did not want to be the only one. she wanted to awaken and female minds of the wonder of science that she experienced that had captivated. she wanted to inspire the next generation of america's engineers and mathematicians and astronauts, and she wanted to teach them as she had grown up believing, that

if you are a girl you can, in fact, do anything. she won the sea beyond the stereotypes and wanted it to be a for-profit company because she sub that will be a way to attract the most talent. she said over and over, we need to makes a high school again. so she and a couple of partners started the company its sole purpose is to get middle school girls and boys interested in math and science and technology and get them committed to a. so that is the woman that i knew. a smart and witty power would come to stay with me in new york and go out and said dragon's during the day. i would come home and find her on my living-room floor. she was, as i say, a superb compartmentalize are able to focus like a laser. her roommate at stanford said she could study through a whistling tea kettle.

and then sally told another reporter she was able to go home at night and flip or area,. she could disappear and into star trek, star wars, or many other less accomplished things. there were, of course, things i did not know. as i say, she was a private individual pick, or ahead doctrine which she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in only had 17 months to live. i did not know she had been living. i did not really appreciate the price it paid for all for fame. this was costly. this was a woman who really did for for being in the library stacks are being by herself or with one friend. she made tens of thousands of speeches and had to psych herself up for every single one. she understood she of on a government expense, we had pav