Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Sally Ride 20140713

Now without slavery in creating the superpower. Its a very powerful revision of american history, economic is very and i think its a tremendously important book. There is a quick preview of some of the books coming out by basic books, an imprint of the Perseus Books group. Lynn sherr recalls the life of sally ride, the First American woman in space. This 45 Minute Program is next on the tv. So, onto the reason why you are all here. Im so pleased to welcome lynn sherr for her new biography trend dies. Were all familiar. Any young women, myself included group wanting to be just like her. Thanks to this new book, we can feel like we know her better than after. Shows a more personal side while showing the wellknown and can tell you tale that is the story. The book clearly benefits from access to family and friends than cooperation in research and some nice and is to share. Of course, she is a onetime journalist at abc news where she covered a variety of topics, including the nasa Space Shuttle program. Were so glad shes here with with us tonight and there was turned off with a quick video. We will welcome her to politics prose. [applause] this is for all of my tv pals, all of my abc friends, this was by the publisher. This is among the early forays into video. I am very pleased at the way it turned out. Its about five minutes long. I am lynn sherr and this is history in five. Im going to tell you five incredible thing about sally ride, americas first woman in space. On july 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to actually spoke ran into this oil. One small step for man a teenager, the aliens watching that night but had no idea she too would one day make cosmetic history. Sally was a baby boomer born in 1951, a valley girl ferment and now, Los Angeles Suburb who is a tennis player. After her sophomore year in college, she realized she didnt have what it took an hour show that kept her from turning pro with my forehand. Sally was fascinated by the science, specifically six, the physics and astronomy. She was blessed with parents and teachers in high school and college and scientific passion. Was my forehand. Sally was fascinated by science, specifically astrophysics, the physics and astronomy. She was busted pants and teachers in high school and college who encouraged her scientific passion as she confided in her best friend she wanted to be famous by winning the nobel prize. She never considered a career at nasa because she didnt think women would be eligible to fly. It is only in 1977 when not to spread a white to recruit women and minorities that sally cut interest it. I want to get at the soonest i can. That means that they could be the first woman. I dont have any great desire to be the first woman. Sally wasnt the first woman is based. Two russians beat her to orbit. Ballentine astir show that in 1963. But in 1978, sally became one of the first experiment chosen to train as nasa astronauts prefix women in the class of 35 new guys. I dont mind people asking me questions about what im going to do on orbit and whether ill be doing any cooking on orbit unless it is fast by someone who asked next the only reason i am flying is because they need someone to serve them coffee. Sally is on the crew because shes qualified to be here. She and her colleagues trained the same as the man, tears falling into shark infested waters, practicing landing and she got hooked. I really want to fly at many times as theyll let me fly. After four years of training, nasas elected guy to be the First American woman to fly. I do feel there some pressure for me to not mess up. The publicity and hoopla surrounding the u. S. Female flyer made her in a celebrity. How did you respond . Had he taken as a human gene . Do you weep . What do you do . Why doesnt anybody ask rictus questions . [laughter] 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four. She was 32 on june 18, 1983 when she left it off sds seven. Left off on sds seven in americas first woman astronaut. Sally felt the immense power of the rocket pushing her off the air. Half a Million People lined the causeways in florida, cheering ride, sally, ride. And then she floated blissfully throughout the cabin when they reached orbit. During the sevenday flight, sally took in the view. Been able to put on a pleasure suited up a notch and have a view of essentially the universe out in front of you. She was especially riveted by this and royal blue line upwards atmosphere. Thats otherwise she would later say. It is clear from that perspective how fragile our existence is. Sally ride was my friend for 30 years. But while i thought i knew her well and really only learned about her by writing this biography. Sally was a fiercely private individual or the public appearances when she could and always preferred the company of one or two people to a crowd. Sally was a superb compartmentalized or who like to control the narrative of her own life and in an era when homosexuality was not widely except that, sally kept her orientation private. She was married to fellow astronaut steve hawley, a bond that lasted for five years. She then entered a relationship with another woman, Tim Oshaughnessy for more than a quartercentury. Sally never talked about her life, never came out publicly. The fully supported the decision to reveal their partnership after her death from pancreatic or in 2012. So who is sally ride . She was a space traveler who sought herself as an educator. She wanted middleschool girls to feel the excitement she had felt in no challenge match the thrill of watching and are on fire and i am gross brain when she learned about lion. Sally was especially intrigued by the possibilities of the planet mars and often told children they would be the one they are. It might be one of few she said. That would be cool. That would be very cool. I was very honored nasa chose me to be the first woman. It time people realized women in this country can do any job they want to do. Palace valley ride. I hope you all are aware that it was this past week there was the 31st anniversary of sallys flight. She landed yesterday 31 years ago exactly. We are celebrating anniversary, which is very exciting. Thank you all for being here in thank you, abc rants. Is that right . My goodness, so many people here. Thats great. Thank you for, and letting me tell you about this terrific woman who somebody i covered someone who was a friend. That is a little bit about sally. Ill tell you a little bit more. I will tell you that her name is now attached to a number of important things. Several schools around the country, and impact crater on the moon, not her Space Science venture ensued a Research Vessel will be called the sally k. Ride and scientists will be able to look beneath the sea for this thing sally was enough in the guy. Posthumously she was awarded president ial medal of freedom. In her lifetime she platers golf in an episode of the tv show, touched by an angel and she threw out the first pitch at a world series game. She was regularly picked to run for office, any office and often asked to be the nasa in a straighter. She turned them all down. Sally was way too private to take such a public job. Plus, sally grew up and let most of her life in Southern California and the perfect climate of Southern California. And when one of her nasa colleague said to her during one change of administration, what would it take to get you to take the job of nasa administrator . Salley said if they move it to california. She was also funny and issue this nsa is that my friend. Thing is her real name was indeed sally ride. How does that happen . But she was not the inspiration before the rocket mustang sally but this wonderful chorus of ride sally ride. She is to say she ran from that on her entire life. I will tell you at the launch, wherein launch, were any of you out to lunch . You are . My absolute favorite sign up to Kennedy Space on her was the stripping cocoa beach. There is a bank that had huge marquee and said brad sally ride and you guys can tackle, too. Much more to Sally Slatkin was being a knowledge by billy joel and his long, we didnt light the fire, where he lives it 56 historic figures or woman over the past 40 years to celebrate his own birthday. They became real fortune and heavy metals suicide. As the song shot to the top of the hot 100, and valley heard it on the radio for the first time in nearly drove off a cliff. Billie jean king was a good friend of hers told me that billie jean also heard it for the first time and every time billie jean would hear the song, she still turns up the volume so she can catch sallys name. Can i do to. So why all the tributes and wind us about this woman . I want to just start with a cartoon. When sally died two years ago of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61, theres a number of political cartoon in papers paying tribute to her. Most of them which i cant deletion in the sky shaped with her initials with a woman symbol or whatever. But this is the one i really liked. It is the teenage girls bedroom and on the walls are pictures of Space Shuttles of rocket ships and on the shelves are physics textbooks and its a surprisingly meek bedroom for a teenage girl. She is sitting there with her ponytail and looking at the tv monitor. The computer monitor. On the computer monitor is sallys obituary. Its a picture of sally ride 1951, 2012. Finding behind her is her mom and her mom she. The girl is talking to her mom. This is the caption. As she is saying his way, are you saying there was a time when there werent any women out or not . Yes indeed. This is really what sallys door is about and this is why she is so important. Sally as i said in the video did not grow up with astronaut jeans. She wanted to be a science and then a tennis player and when that didnt work out it was right back to science. Says to herself, i can do that. Puts down the paper, holds on to her coffee, goes into the next room, finds paper, pen, an envelope and a stamp it was that long ago and sends off to nasa for an application immediately. This is a woman who was dead set on being an academic. She totally knew what she was going to do for the rest of her life. Boom, she pivots, turns on a dime. It totally changed her life. Some 25,000 people also sent in for that particular application. A little over 8,000 actually applied. Of them, 1500 were 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 into the program, but they actually reached out for them. In the beginning, the Space Program was about men, it was about white men. They were very brave, they were very smart, they were very accomplished, they did miraculous things. And they but they all had, for the host part, they had military backgrounds. Not all of them, but in the very beginning all of them had military backgrounds. Thats mostly because be president eisenhower said in 1958 in response to the soviet sputnik satellite that had been launched, if were going to do a human space flight program, we want to fast track it and, therefore, we need to get individuals who already have training, who already know how to fly jets although this had nothing to do with flying a jet and who understand danger and who are already vetted for security reasons. There was actually no reason whatsoever that women could not have flown in those early flights, but they chose to do it the other way, and so for the first nearly quarter century thats really what it was. After the last men left the moon in 1972, we then had sky lab, we had the ram with the soviets program with the soviets who were now becoming our friends, but it wasnt until we had the Space Shuttle which was a different kind of spacecraft that they could actually reach out for more individuals. And the reason was in part because the says shuttle was like the Space Shuttle was like a plane. It was much bigger than the capsules that had taken our men to the moon. John glenn used to joke you didnt really get into a space capsule, you put it on. [laughter] they were really small, those original ones. Now we have a space plane, the shuttle, which can handle crews of seven, eight, nine, lots of people. So theyre looking for more individuals, and theyre also looking for women and minorities because what they really want to add to the pilots, the cohort of pilots is to add scientists. And this is where sally finally got her chance. So now sally is chosen to be an astronaut. This is quite an amazing thing for her. Sally was very private. She was absolutely an introvert. Theres that miersbriggs psychology scale, and on one side are the is for the introverts, and sally was 100 on the i side. Didnt react much to anything, very cool under pressure made her a perfect astronaut, of course. 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. Calls up her best friend, the one in the picture to whom she said i want to win the nobel prize. Calls up her friend, her friend answers the phone, and sally says, hi there, this is your friendly local astronaut calling. [laughter] and thats the way she identified herself for the rest of the time to that woman. Sallys parents shared the glory in their own idiosyncratic way. Her father who taught Political Science in santa monica, sally said this has solved my dads problems. When i said i was going to be an ago to physicist, he had not a clue how to explain what i did. Now that im an astronaut, hes fine. [laughter] her mother spun it differently. Joyce ride said, oh, well, one of them will get to heaven. [laughter] but before she got there, sally learned that being elevated to the Astronaut Corps also meant facing a press corps with very little imagination. This is january of 1978. Two russian women have flown, we know almost nothing about them, and now there are six women in, being named to the Astronaut Corps. So sally, the academic shes out at stanford, remember goes to her first press conference, never in her life been at a press conference, and she is subject to questions like arent you afraid of being in orbit with all those men . And then we had do you cant to run into any ufos . Sally calmly answered no to the latter and assured the former that her academic career as an astrophysics student had made her very comfortable around males. I first met sally in 1981 when abc asked me to join our team covering the thenupcoming Space Shuttle program. And those of you, obviously, remember we had a great team that was prepared to do that. We had an anchorman named Frank Reynolds who had covered all the apollo and gemini and mercury flights and was very, very knowledgeable. He was terrific. We had a science correspondent who had practically invented the field jailed Jules Bergman who could not be beat but they wanted someone else, and ive described my addition to the team as i was the color guy in the baseball booth. I was there to do the feature stories and sideline things. For a variety of reasons, i wound up anchoring everything up until the challenger explosion. And it was a great assignment. But my very first assignment on my first trip to the Johnson Space center in houston was to do a story on the socalled new breed of astronauts. Thats these Mission Specialists who were no longer the hot shot pilots. And sally was one of the people that nasa gave me, gave us to interview. And the two of us just hit it off ip instantly. I liked instantly. I liked her manner, i liked her sense of humor. I loved the fact that she spoke english and not techno talk and the fact that she acknowledged she would not be there if it werent for the womens movement, that she didnt do this alone, it had taken a lot of social pressure, and she was very proud of that. I also asked her at one point in my very first interview in 1981 why do you want to go into space . And i was expecting, you know, one of these cocky anded responses that a jet pilot would give you. Sally said, i dont know. She said, ive discovered that half the people would love to go into space, and theres no need to explain it to them, but if someone doesnt and the other half cant understand it, and i couldnt explain it to them. If someone doesnt know why, she said, i cant explain it. Which i thought was quite refreshing in this fraternity of white male Fighter Pilot jocks. As the program developed and i wound up anchoring abcs coverage, we spent a lot of time together. We bonded over cold shrimp and funny stories at a variety of dives in and around the Johnson Space Center Including one that always promised on mud wrestling on friday nights that we managed to avoid. [laughter] when she married her fellow astronaut, steve holy, their home became my beer and pizza hangout during other peoples missions. Sally, of course, got her big chance five years later, five years after she got to nasa, and i think, i think she was the right choice. Any one of the six women would have done us proud. Theyre all very talented, theyre all very accomplished, they all would have been terrific. I really think sally was the right choice for a variety of reasons. She was daring, she was an optimist, she trained endlessly, she answered questions tirelessly. Ball of that attention but 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 anywhere. And ive been at a lot of press conferences. And that was the question that you saw in the video, and it was asked by a fellow from Time Magazine who at the final preflight press conference actually said to sally, what happens when theres a problem, do you weep . There was a gasp from the audience as there was in this room when you all heard it before. I was sitting, and there was a lot of eyeball rolling. What is extraordinary about sally, though, and you saw her reaction, is how she responded. She didnt go for the guys eyes, she didnt say a nasty, horrible thing. She laughed, she smiled, she turns to rick who was the pilot of her crew and says, why doesnt anyone ever ask rick these questions, and defuses the entire thing. It was absolutely brilliant. Im sure that nasa was highfiving itself, the managers in the back room, when this happened. Another male reporter actually asked sally did you ever wish you were a boy . Sally gritted her teeth ive seen the video and said, no, i never thought about it. Within nasa there were a few other hurdles they had to leap. The six women when sally was chosen, she suddenly had to make a lot of decisions about things like what kinds of things would go in the personal toiletries kit that they took aloft, that kind of thing. Sally was smart enough to immediately bring in the other five women and say we are doing this as a group, because she knew that any decision she made was going to devolve on the next person and then the next and then the next. So they did manage to get the old spice after shave lotion and the british sterling deodorant replaced by some more femalefriendly lotions and potions. [laughter] and they also managed to get nasa to add what only nasa could refer to as hair restraints, we call them rubber bands. [laughter] but it wasnt just nasa, and it wasnt just the press. When the original launch date was moved back a couple of months to accommodate a schedule change, it wasnt a delay, they were just shifting things armed, Johnny Carson joked on the tonight show that the Space Shuttle could be delayed so that sally ride could get a purse to match her shoes. [laughter] i have screened all of the Johnny Carson jokes about sally over that period. They only got worse, and they were awful, frathouse gags. I am very happy to tell you that the audience over time ignored him and then started booing him. The idea of an American Woman in space had gone from becoming a punchline to a matter of national pride. And the entire nation was riding with sally when she lifted off in june of 1983. Just before she went i got my oneonone interview, thats the interviews that you saw in the video, and i asked her, look, do you feel under any special pressure because youre the First American woman, and she said, yes, i do feel under pressure. I feel pressure not to mess up. And what she meant was she felt pressure not to mess up for her crew. Any Space Mission is a group effort, and its a team event. And she wanted to do well for the crew. She wanted to do well for the mission, she wanted to do well for nasa, she wanted to do well for the united states, and she wanted to do well for the future of human space flight. But overall, i think she wanted to do well for women. Because she understood that if she messed up, her term, that it would be said that no woman can ever fly again because one woman messed up. And she understood that if she did well, that would open the door for all the rest of them. And listen to this comment from a female astronaut from a later generation, a woman by the name of Pamela Melroy who not only flew, but also commanded the Space Shuttle, one of the few women to have done that. Heres what she says. She says it wasnt until after i became an entrant that i discovered the most important gift that sally gave me which she was tremendously competent. The reputation of everyone who comes after you depends on how well you do. Sally opened those door ands smoothed the path for all women because she was very good at what she did. And i think thats really 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 really playful. The night before the launch, the afternoon before the launch sally was, her picture was on every magazine cover, she was the host famous person on the planet the most famous person on the planet. Every reporter at the Kennedy Space center, of course, wanted to see her, wanted to interview her. Astronauts are put in quarantine for a couple of days before they fly so that we humans dont give them any stray germs that could really, really screw up the mission. So sally was in quarantine, and everybody, of course, wanted to know how sally, whats going on, and there was just a lid on the whole thing. So im sitting in our abc news work space which, of course, was a trailer, our glamorous work space, the day before working on my script for that nights piece, and the phone rings, and someone picks it up and says, lynn, its for you. And be i pick up the phone, and this little voice says, hi there, what are you doing in five minutes . I said, i dont know, sally, what am i doing in five minutes . She said walk outside your trailer, turn left, go down the gravel path and stop. So i did that, and there was sally in cutoffs, a tshirt, flipflops leaning against the car 25 yards away and waving at me. And what she was doing was saying she was, number one, pushing the envelope a little bit because the rules were no contact with the press, and 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 she also wanted to give me something to report that night on the air that sally ride was doing very well, thank you very much. This is the way that i actually remember her best. So off she goes on that beautiful, gorgeous june morning. They had a perfect flight, an absolutely perfect flight, and one of my standup closes that week said, i said technologically nasa is pushing towards the 21st century, but in human terms it is finally it has finally entered the 20th. [laughter] and i did have a little trouble getting that standup through, i might point out. This will not surprise you, amelia. [laughter] i also took my mother to the launch. My mother was pushing 80, and she loved it. Afterwards she said, it was perfect. She said, i saw the horse and buggy, i saw the airplane and now this. [laughter] i felt really good. When they landed a week later at Edwards Air Force base in california, president reagan telephoned his congratulationses and said to sally, somebody said that sometimes the best man for the job is a woman. You were there because you were the best person for the job. Which i think is absolutely true. And millions of people around the world agree, particularly women, particularly young women. They translated her bold journey into their own tickets to success. And the thinking was if she can do that, i can do anything. Whether it was getting out of the typing pool or getting into medical school or whatever, many, many women wanted to do this really opened the door for an awful lot of women. Sally had a wonderful time. She worked very hard. But one of the thing that she did is what all astronauts do is when things got a little slow, which was rare, she would drift over to the window and look back at earth. And that image that she saw of the earth with the earths atmosphere totally changed her life. She said it was as if someone had taken a royal blue crayon and drawn a line around the earth. And sometimes she changed the metaphor. She would say that line is as thin as the fuzz on a tennis ball. Or shed say it was the earths space suit. And thats our atmosphere. Thats the only thing thats protecting us from the harsh reality of outer space. Without that atmosphere, none of us would be here. We could not survive. And thats when she began to understand the fragility of this planet that we live on and directed a huge amount of her life towards getting science and government and children interested in doing something about protecting the earth. That was just the beginning of sallys contributions to the planet and to nasa. After the challenger explosion, of course, she served on the Rogers Commission which investigated that. And as it turns out, became the source i did not know this until i had found this while researching the book she was the source and is 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. With nasa essentially shut down to repair the system and reconfigure the program, sally moved here to washington where she undertook a major study at nasa headquarters to help determine the future of the says agency. And thats the one in which she recommended, first, something called to called mission to planet earth which was treating earth as an exotic planet the same way we look at mars and venus and Everything Else out there and expending some of our vast energy and wisdom on fixing whats 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 in other commissions and also on the Investigative Commission when the columbia disintegrated in 2003 on its reentry to earth. She was the only shuttle astronaut to serve on both commissions and made a huge contribution to that one also. Once sally was the bright new face of nasa, and now she became its conscience. She really cared about the space agency, really wanted to fix it when something went wrong, and later in life when she had left nasa, she worked with nasa on many, many projects. She got them to put a camera in space first on the shut and then on shuttle and then on the space station and hooked it in with kids classrooms so that youngsters could sit in the classroom, punch buttons and take pictures of parts of the earth that they wanted to study. She called that one earth cam. And then when someone else was sending up some satellites to do research in orbit around the moon, sally put a camera on those satellites and got kids this school to be able to take pictures of the moon, and she called that one moon cam. She was always giving back with kids. This is really what she wanted to do. And thats what she was really building up to. Being first was fine, but she didnt want to be the only one. She wanted to awaken young female minds to the wonder of science that she had experienced that had captivated her. She wanted to inspire the next generation of americas engineers and mathematicians and astronauts, and she wanted to teach them, as she had grown up believing, that if youre a girl you can, in fact, do anything. She wanted them to see beyond the stereotypes, and she wanted it to be a forprofit company because she thought that would be the way to attract the most talent. She said over and over we need to make science cool again. So she and a couple of partners started a Company Called sally ride science which still exists, and its sole purpose is to get middle school girls and boys as well interested in math and science and technology and get them committed to it. So thats the woman that i knew, a smart and witty pal who she would come to stay with me in new york, and she would go out and slay dragons during the day, and at night she would have her legs on the coffee table watching television. She was, as i say, a superb compartmentallizer, 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 also able to go home at night and, quote, flip the switch marked oblivious. She could just disappear into star trek, into star wars or many other less accomplished things that she watched. There were, of course, these things i did not know about sally, but as i say, she was a very private individual. Kept a lot of things. I did not know she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and and only had 17 months to live, i did not know she had been living with tam, and i didnt really appreciate the psychic price she had paid for all of her fame. This was very costly to her. This is a woman who really did prefer being in the Library Stacks or being by herself or with one friend, and she made thousands, tens of thousands of speeches and had to psych herself up for every single one. But she understood that she had flown at government expense, that we had paid the way, that it was a Government Agency and that Public Relations was part of the giveback. And she went out there, and she just did it. I think her legacy is completely secure. And the course of writing this book, more than 200 interviews with her family and Close Friends and colleagues, i learned things about her i had no idea about, but i found the same extraordinary woman id known when i covered her. She was at base a california girl who wanted to save the planet, an introvert whose radiant spirit pulled her into public service. She was an academic who could explain rain drops to a class full of College Students and the wonders of weightlessness to a room full of little girls. She was really lucky with her parents, very progressive individuals. Her father was a purple heart in world war ii, and eisenhower an eisenhower republican. Her mother was a complete lefty who loved the fact that her vote canceled out her husbands every single time. [laughter] they both believed in education. Sally was lucky because of the emphasis on science that this country adopted after the sputnik. Sally was a little girl in 1957 when sputnik went up, and she benefited from all that. I was in high school. Perhaps some of you did the same thing. I remember going outside in my backyard on a cold november night and looking up and seeing this thing going around, this thing that really started this space race and the space age. And you turned on the radio, and is it went beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and it was really scary. Sally benefited from the push to science after that. She benefited from the womens movement. She did not plan her life far in advance, and when opportunity knocked, she was ready to open the door and sail right through it. I think, and and i used to tell her this, that what she did in that stanford uniyoon that day when she read the article that said nasa was looking for women, the fact that she could change her career plans like that, that she could just move on it, i thought it was a great lesson. Sally took a different moral from that moment, and she would deadan to student audiences, i guess the message is read your college newspaper. [laughter] and she did it all with a smile. When she returned from that first flight she flew twice in june of 83, after all the work she had done she said from the tarmac the thing ill remember most about this flight is that it was fun. In fact, im sure it was the most fun ill ever have in my life. She was 32 years old. But years later she lab rated facing elaborated imagine a room twice this size, and she would say to the kids, imagine this room in space. You could do 35 somersaults in a row. [laughter] she would say my favorite thing about space was being weightless. Theres not even a close second, and every eye in the room would be huge and wide, and all those kids would immediately sign up to be astronauts. Sally was an icon to kids and to grownups alike. She was 55 and a half, but she could intimidate the best of them. As one colleague put it, it was only after you left her presence that you realized she was really short. It was that ability to be bigger than you actually are. She was a child of the eisenhower years who was inspired by kennedy, marched against nixon, flew under reagan and then advised clinton and obama, always capturing and challenging the mood of our times to change our world. Flying in space was neither her childhood goal, nor her adult commitment. But having done it twice, she cherished the adventure. I actually call what ive learned from sally flying lessons, because she can teach all of us how to fly high without ever leaving the earth. I think her life reminds us that whatever our own perm limits, there is personal limits, there is always something out there grander than we can measure, more marvelous than we can imagine, something that is just waiting to be explored. She proved that you dont need the right plumbing to have the right stuff in any field, in any endeavor. And after smashing through the ultimate Glass Ceiling without messing up, her term, i think she brought back the ultimate lesson. She was asked over and over what did you see out there, what was it like, what did you see . And sally, who incidentally her undergraduate degree in physics, she had a double major as an undergraduate, she also majored in english which i truly hate her for, she was a shakespearean, can you imagine . [laughter] so when she was asked this question, sally put science and eloquence together, and she translated the dazzling reality that she saw out there into a beam of encouragement for the rest of us on earth. What did she see out there . Im going to repeat the words that you saw on the screen. She would say the stars dont look bigger, but they do look brighter. I think its exactly the kind of message you hear from, you want to hear from the First American woman in space; an optimist, a sunny, cando person who made us all believe that this is a wonderful way to live our lives. Thank you very much. [applause] we do have some time left for questions. If you have a question, please do come to our audience microphone here on the side. Be brave. [laughter] but dont ask me about weeping. [laughter] this one ought to be easy. And i, actually, apologize for almost changing the subject, but im curious about the soviet women, the two soviet women right. The two soviet women. Really sort of lost track right. Knowledge of them. Has no one written anything roughly part of the question is about the two soviet cosmonauts, female cosmonauts. 1963 and 1982. We dont know a huge amount about them. Vallen teen that valentino in particular, her flight was dismissed by americans who really knew nothing about it. And they sort of poohpoohed it and said she didnt really do a very good job. That, if im not mistaken, has been proven to be false. She did a fine job. But this was not the soviet union suddenly making a stand on behalf of women, because no woman flew again for almost 20 years. We dont know a whole lot about her. We know a lot more about svetlana who was a very accomplished flier, and theres a wonderful story that i tell in the book, and ill just give you the bare outline of it for now. Sally, after her flight, is on the publicity tour, the postflight publicity tour that they all have to do, and one of the places they go is budapest for an International Aeronautics federation heating. And remember the Korean Airlines jet that was shot down by the russians in 1983 . And this was right after that. So the state Department Said to sally and rick houk, the pilot, and both of their spouses no frat earnizing fraternizing with the enemy. Our cold war enemy was at that moment behaving really badly, and we had terrible relationships. And they said we dont want any front Page Pictures of you all drinking vodkas and toasting each other and having a wonderful time. Stay away from the cosmonauts. So they thought, terrific, we will do that. They get there, and theyre behaving, and all of a sudden sally at one reception feels a tap on her shoulder, and heres sally and she turns around, and there is svetlana. [laughter] so here is sally ride who has just one month earlier become the First American woman in space meeting for the first time one of only two other women who have ever been in space, and shes dying to talk to her. And i wont give ill