Sally Ride, the first US woman to travel into space died in La Jolla,
California on 23 July 2012. She was 61. She was suffering from
pancreatic cancer.
Ride fired the imagination of millions of women across the world when
she set off for space in the US space shuttle Challenger in June 1983.
Sally Ride was, however, not the first woman to travel into space, as
Valentina Tereshkova of erstwhile USSR had visited space in June 1963.
Born on 26 May 1951 at Los Angeles, California, Ride received her
Masters degree in Physics from Stanford University. Subsequently, she
joined NASA in 1978. Ride went on her first space shuttle mission on
board the Challenger in 1983. She was only 32 when she first travelled
into space, making her the youngest person in America at the time to go
into space.
Her second space visit occurred in 1984, also aboard the Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space.
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