Sally Ride, a 32-year-old physicist, launched aboard Challenger as a mission specialist, becoming the first American woman to fly in space—twenty years after Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova achieved the feat. Ride operated the shuttle's robotic arm to deploy and retrieve satellites, and the six-day mission drew intense media scrutiny of her gender that she found exasperating and occasionally absurd.
NASA selected Ride from over 8,000 applicants in its historic 1978 astronaut class, the first to include women. Reporters peppered her with questions before launch about whether spaceflight would affect her reproductive organs and whether she cried when things went wrong—questions never posed to her male colleagues.
Aboard Challenger, Ride operated the Canadarm robotic arm with precision, deploying two communications satellites and conducting the first satellite retrieval using the arm. She later said the thing she remembered most was simply how much fun it was.
Ride's flight opened doors: she paved the way for a generation of American women astronauts. She died in 2012, and it was only in her obituary that the public learned she had a longtime female partner, making her also the first known LGBT astronaut.