NASA selected 35 new astronaut candidates, the first class to include women and became the first to admit them, among them physicist Sally Ride. The announcement marked a deliberate break from the all-male, mostly military astronaut corps of earlier decades, reflecting new eligibility rules that opened astronaut selection to scientists and engineers regardless of test-pilot experience.
NASA's earlier astronaut classes had drawn almost exclusively from military test pilots, a pool that effectively excluded women, since the armed forces barred them from that role. The 1978 class, nicknamed 'the Thirty-Five New Guys,' broke that pattern by recruiting mission specialists with science and engineering backgrounds, opening the door to six women, including Ride, Judith Resnik, and Kathryn Sullivan.
Ride, a Stanford astrophysicist, had answered a newspaper ad seeking astronaut applicants almost on a whim, competing against 8,000 other candidates for one of the 35 spots. She trained for five years before flying aboard the Challenger in June 1983.
Journalists at her pre-flight press conference famously asked whether spaceflight would affect her reproductive organs and whether she cried when things went wrong, questions that seem absurd in hindsight but reflected how unprecedented her selection still felt. Ride went on to fly twice and later co-founded a company to promote science education for girls.
Key people: Sally Ride