Centuries earlier. His crime was revealing the earth is not the center of the universe. Susans was revealing men are not. [laughter] [applause] both of these things are the sort of revolutionary thoughts that have guided most of my professional life, whether as a reporter in print or on television or in writing books. And yes, i have witnessed a lot of revolutions in my career, consider for example, the new yorker cartoon, about 20 years ago, fellow walks into a bookstore walks up to the bespectacled clerk she says to him, nodding wisely, yes, she says books by men are in the basement. Nothing personal gentlemen. The truth of course is that womens books and everything women do and womens place is everywhere right now but whether it is books or on television, or in real life, i actually learned about my place on the planet from a series of experiences that i had while i was working in Television News. One of them was, when i was back at abc news, where i enjoyed a long and wonderful career. One day my piece was done early for world news, what was then 7 00 probably 6 30 news. I got to leave early. I went with my husband over to visit my motherinlaw. I loved her and watched me on television a lot. Never seen me in the same room while the tv was on. So at one point, larry said mother lynn, has a piece on the news and watched. He stood in the front of room and turned on tv. Diana was sitting in her chair watching and i was next to the tv as well. Here is what happened. Tv came on. My piece came on and diana looked at the tv, then she looked at me. Then she looked at the tv and looked at me, back and forth the entire minute and 10 seconds. I dont think she absorbed a word what i was saying. The poor woman who was so smart had escaped from revolutionary czar it russia, under a load of hey, come to new york, started a business in the garment center, ran her whole life brilliantly, raise ad fabulous son. This woman could not understand how i could be on television and in her room at the same time. [laughter] which to me was the genuine article. That is results that when you step outside of the box. I know that is a position or mindset i adopted regularly as a kind of a reality check on that very strong medium medium. On the flip side of the diana story, occurred during the first Space Shuttle liftoff. Im down at the cape for abc news. Im out in the socalled vip area out in front, and Frank Reynolds our anchor who you probably remember, wonderful reporter and anchorman is up in the booth. At one point frank turned to me, and now we go to lynn sherr to find out what is happening in the vip area. It is pitch black. It is predawn. All these folks around us waiting for the first shuttle liftoff you may remember didnt happen until two weeks later. Nonetheless, there we are. While i was doing the whole thing there was a little black and white tv monitor about this big sitting on the ground in front of me so that i could know when frank through it to me. I had earpiece on but i could see what was going on. Frank throws it to me and my producer stands there with her arms out like a bird sort of holding, you know, keeping the crowds away. Im talking into the camera and im kind of looking at the monitor and im, no doubt saying something terribly important and i noticed, the crowd was very hushed which was good for my ego. Then i realized that even though i was standing there, all five feet eight 1 2 inches of me, living, breathing color, every eye in the crowd was looking at black and white seveninch tv monitor. Tv was the reality. Life a mere bystander. This is the sort of thing that went on for much of my television life. As a local Television News reporter in new york i got a call early one morning that there had been, there was a story i had to cover, there had been one of these miracle micro surgery operations. One of the very first ones back in the early 70s, when a mans hand was reattached to his arm and i was supposed to go out to brooklyn to cover the story. There was a press conference about it. I threw on clothes. Randown stairs. Crew picked me up. We drive out to brooklyn. Walk across the parking lot, im carrying a try p. O. D. Someone taking something else. Little old man says hey, youre on television. Yes, im on television. Hey, youre lynn sherr, arent you . , i said, yes, thank you very much. Thank you for recognizing me. He looked at me and said, you look better on television. So i tran to the ladies room and put on makeup and we went from there. After i left that job, and had been off the air several weeks. I was walking on lexington avenue near blame ming bloomingdales in new york someone said, didnt you used to be lynn sherr . How does one respond . It is confusing. One morning back at abc, i was down at the cape getting ready to anchor one of the Early Morning launches. Remember most of the launches were really early in the morning. Which meant if you were anchoring them you had to be this position real real early in the morning or late at night. My husband had come down to join me. It seafaring in the morning. He 4 00 in the morning. I am in the other seat going over last minute notes. He turns to me with his eyes buyerly open and turns to me and says, thank you for sharing the glamorous part of your life. The truth of course it has been very glamorous. Reporting Television News, was i cant say so much for now, but it was a wonderful and exciting and important way live my life. I think we did a very critically important things. I think we saved some lives around i had an awful lot of fun doing it. And i will say that while i loved covering politics, and i loved all the pieces i did about social change and all sorts of things, one of the most exuberant stories i got to cover was covering the Space Program. So writing this new book, sally ride americas first woman in space, has been a combination of a labor of love. Bittersweet basally was my good friend and also a way of reliving and retelling some of the most important moments in our countrys history. In terms of the book, let me start with a cartoon. And the scene is teenage girls bedroom, a surprisingly neat teenage girls bedroom i might add. And it is bursting with science textbooks and posters of the Space Shuttle and astronomy books and globes and all sorts of wonderful things about this this young woman. And the teenager sitting in her tshirt, at her desk, at her computer staring at the monitor. On the monitor is the very sad news that sally ride americas first woman in space has just died. She is looking at the headline sally ride, 19512012. There is picture, very familiar picture of sally. The teenage girl is looking on in utter shock. Not so much what she sees on the screen but the backstory. Behind her is standing her mom and in her mom jeans and the mom is saying something to the girl but the caption is the teenage girl. What the teenage girl is saying to her mom is, wait, wait are you saying it there was a time when there werent any women astronauts . Yes. Exactly. Sally ride, did not grow up with astronaut dreams. Back then the job was simply not available. When she was born in may of 1951, the United StatesSpace Program was a mens club, a white mens club. Restricted to Fighter Pilots and military men. The few women who did apply and keep in mind we have a lot of very qualified women pilots in those days in the early 50s middle 50s out of world war ii and work they had done. But all of these talented women were summarily rejected. Women were considered too weak too unscientific, too well, womanly to fly in the Space Program. One newspaper editorialized that a female in the cockpit would be, and i quote, a nagging back seat rocket driver. Thank you very much. Good gasp. Columnist ridiculed the prospect of winning women as astronauts calling themmals slownets. Sally ride loved nasa as a kid but interest in nasa was simply aspect tate tore. Like most kids in that era certainly some of you watched early space liftoffs when the teacher wheeled in a big black and white tv set with rabbit ears in the classroom and watched john glenn and everybody else take off. She learned tennis. Was so accomplished on junior circuit and womens circuit considered turning pro. She dropped out of college a few months to give it a try. When she realized she would not be one of the elite of the elite, that is all sally ride would have ever settled for she decided that was not the place she needed to be. Years later when she would be asked what it was that had stopped her from a tennis career sally always said which is fully, my forehand. It never stopped her forward progress. When tennis didnt work out pivoted to science. Went up to Stanford University for her undergraduate and her masters and doctorate in astrophysics. Point out, say she was not underachiever. She was double english and astrophysics major when she was an undergraduate. Sally was in the midst of writings her Postgraduate School applications one morning in 1977 january 1977, when she weeks up in the morning. Goes to the stanford Student Union to get a coffee and sweet role to wake up before class. Picks up the stanford daily and never gets beyond the front page. The headline was just above the fold, and it read, nasa to recruit women. Sallys future just dropped in her lap. Nasa was finally reaching out. This is january of 1977 for women and minorities, for the upcoming new Space Shuttle program. Unlike the the tools and the directions of the original Space Program which was to get us to the moon and which, and which meant riding in those little tiny spacecraft mercury, gemini and apollo, john glenn used to joke you didnt so much climb into the mercury capsule as you put it on. So unlike these little tiny spacecraft, the shuttle was now the size of an airplane. They could have larger crews. It was a whole different ballgame. Because we were now not going to just one other place, the moon, but the Space Shuttle would lift off, circle the earth, many many times and then return to earth, there was a chance. There was a chance to do science in space. There was a chance to do experiments. We would launch the hubble space telescope. We would build a spacetation nasa figured out in order to get this done, it was time, they were bowing to some special pressure i should add in legal cases but well leave that aside for now. But it was time to add scientists. People who would conduct experiments in space and do all of these things. They called the new category of astronaut, mission specialist. Thanks to all of these pressures on them and to their own awakening they wanted different genders and different races. So they put out the call for women and minorities and actively recruited them starting in 1976. Sally got the news via the article in the stanford union, the stanford daily in january of 1977. She is sitting there drinking her coffee, reading the article, looks at Job Description of a new kind of astronaut called a mission specialist, says to herself, i could do that. Puts down the paper goes off in search of stationary, a pen and envelope and a stamp. It was that long ago. And immediately sends off to nasa to request an application. Sally was one of more than 25,000 people who wrote in for that application. Eight thousand people filled them in, including more than 1500 women. In the end, after a very long process of interviews and screening and some very anxious moments, sally was one of 35 individuals chosen as the first class of shuttle astronauts. Of them six were women three africanamericans, men and one hawaiian men man. Nasa was suddenly looking like the poster child for multiculturalism and sally was over the moon in her own way. When she got the call telling her the job was hers, sally, who by her own definition was very shy, very private very much an introvert genetically when she got the call she says she went jumping up and down in her bedroom, screaming and yelling. Picks up the phone and calls her best friend from high school. Hi there this is your friendly local astronaut calling. That is the way she identified herself to that friend for the rest of her life. Her parents shared the glory in their own idiosyncratic way. Sally used to joke that her father who taught Political Science at a Community College in Santa Monica Sallys father, she said, never understood science, didnt have a scientific bone in his body. When sally was growing up, studying astrophysics her father could not explain to anyone what she did. Now that im an astronaut she said, his problems are solved. Sallys mother, irrepressible joyce ride, when she got the news, told a reporter with sally going into space and her sister studying to be a minister, one of them would get to heavyp ven. Before heaven. Before she got there sally learned becoming an astronaut in 1978, meant a lot, or a little to a press corps with very little imagination. Keep in mind, january 1978. One woman had flown in space a russian woman she flew in 1963. But because the soviet union was our cold war enemy, there was very little news, no transparency. We knew almost nothing about this woman or what happened in her spaceflight. The United StatesSpace Program for all of its wonderful glory i take nothing away from it, by january of 1978 nasa had flown exactly three females in space, two spiders and one monkey. So sally an academic, a graduate student, she didnt know from press conferences gets to her First Press Conference and she is stunned by the stupidity of questions like arent you afraid of being in orbit with all those men . And do you expect to run into any ufos . Sally calmly answered no to the latter and assured former her academic career as astrophysicist made her very comfortable around males. I first met sally in 1981 when abc asked me to then join our Terrific Team to cover the upcoming Space Shuttle program. As i mentioned the anchor was Frank Reynolds. Our science correspondent was a terrific guy jewels bergman who practically invented field. They want ad third person to the team for variety of reasons. Im describing myself as the color guy in the baseball booth. I was there to do feature stories. Because of number of things i wound up becoming lead reporter and anchoring all Space Shuttle missions and landings through the challenger explosion. It was really fun. My first assignment when i ght to the Johnson Space center in houston, was to, this is april of 1981. The first shuttle was about to launch. Excuse me i went to . January of 1981 to prepare for the first launch in april. My story was do a story on first breed of astronauts women minorities, people who were not jetFighter Pilots of old. We asked nasa a group of individuals who were representative, sally was one of the new bees that nasa offered up. I loved her at first because she spoke english not tech know talk and her direct manner an determination. I asked her why do you want to go intointo space . I expect ad cocky response that you got from the dominant astronaut culture. Instead she says to me, i dont know. She said. I have discovered that half the people would love to go into space and there is no need to explain it to them. The other half cant understand and i couldnt explain it to them. If someone doesnt want to know why, i cant explain it. I thought that was just wonderful. In fraternity of up tight crewcuts she was a breath of fresh feminism readily acknowledging if it werent for the Womens Movement she would not have her job. She also acknowledged that nasa with its 20year heritage of white male Fighter Pilots had finally done the right thing. We became friends immediately. As the program developed and i wound up anchoring abcs coverage, sally and i continued to spend time together. We bonded over cold shrimp and cold beer. And funny stories at a variety of local dives one of which i recall offered mud wrestling which we managed to avoid. We both shared a healthy disregard for the overblown egos and conservative intransigence of both of our professions. Beneath her unemotional demeanor a lot of people found icy, i found a caring friend with a very impish wit. When she married fellow astronaut steve hawley, their home became my beer and pizza hangout during other folks shuttle missions. Sally got her chance five years later. She was the first of six women chosen to fly. She immediately became our newest american hero, a smart and funny and daring optimist who trained endlessly and answered questions tirelessly. The public attention was both flattering and frustrating to her. Still reflecting that, still reflecting the difficulties that some had with accepting the entrance of women into this previously maleonly club. Including the one i would nominate as the dumbest question ever asked at a press conference anywhere, and i have been to a lot of press conferences. We are now ask the the at the, in may of 1983. Sally flew in june of 1983. The crew was up there for their preflight press conference. So it is sally and four men in her crew sitting with her. Questions went along pretty well. Reporter from Time Magazine asks the question dr. Ride, he said, i know that you have been through an entire year of training. I know it has been a very intense year. I know things sometimes go wrong in the simulator. When something does go wrong, when there is a glitch, like the shuttle crashes in simulation, when something really bad happens, how do you handle it, he said . Do you weep . Right. This is 1983. So, were in a room of about half the size of this and most of the press corps including all of the women i might add, kind of rolled their eyes went, oh my goodness, silently. Sally, this moment exists on tape and you can watch this you can dial it up on youtube or something. Sally, gets the question. You see this look on her face like who is this person . She rolls her eyes, and then she starts to laugh and she smiles. She turns to rick hawk