Sally Ride
Answered a newspaper advert and became the first American woman in space, then went back to teaching
Sally Ride grew up in Los Angeles, a strong enough tennis player as a teenager that Billie Jean King suggested she turn professional. She chose physics instead, and in 1977 was finishing a doctorate at Stanford in astrophysics when she saw a notice in the student newspaper: NASA was recruiting astronauts and, for the first time, would consider women. She was one of six chosen from more than eight thousand applicants.
She worked for five years as a capsule communicator and helped develop the shuttle's robot arm before being assigned to fly. At a press conference before the launch reporters asked whether she would wear make-up in space, whether she cried when things went wrong, and whether the flight would harm her reproductive organs. She answered with patience and dry humour. On 18 June 1983, aged 32, she flew on Challenger as a mission specialist, and flew again the following year.
After the Challenger disaster in 1986 she served on the presidential commission that investigated it, and later on the inquiry into the loss of Columbia, the only person to sit on both. She left NASA in 1987, taught physics at the University of California, San Diego, and set up Sally Ride Science to produce books and programmes encouraging girls and young people into science.
She was intensely private. When she died of pancreatic cancer in 2012 her obituary revealed for the first time that Tam O'Shaughnessy, her business partner, had been her partner in life for 27 years.