SPACE CENTER, Houston -- Sally K. Ride, scheduled to be America's first female astronaut in space next June, is a cool, determined woman with an unusual distaste for publicity.
Ms. Ride, 32, a Stanford University Ph.D. in physics, joined the space corps in 1978 and is one of eight American women astronauts.
She will be the third woman in space unless the Russians send up another before her flight aboard space shuttle Challenger. The Soviets sent up Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya last August.
Ms. Ride may not want to steal the show from her fellow crew members or from Challenger, or perhaps she would rather concentrate on her work, but she appears not to be shy but simply to dislike publicity.
She does her duty -- obviously very well -- and grants interviews and appears at news conferences when required.
But when she first was named to join commander Robert Crippen's team on Challenger's second flight, she was unavailable for reaction.
She married fellow astronaut Steven Hawley last July and NASA, at her request, merely confirmed the event afterward.
She refused an invitation to appear in a Bob Hope television special in Austin, Texas.
Joyce Ride of Encino, Calif., said her daughter's cool facade sometimes slips, as when she called to announce her selection as an astronaut.
'Sally is normally very cool, very low-key, but when she called to tell me the news, she was bordering on breathlessness,' Mrs. Ride said.
Sally Ride received some public exposure as a capsule communicator in mission control for the second and third flights of space shuttle Columbia. The capsule communicator is the mission control spokesman to the orbiting shuttle.
Ms. Ride was calm, collected -- occasionally witty -- but generally revealed little of her personality in 'capcom' comments monitored by the media.
Her father in one interview described her as extremely competitive.
'She knows what she can do and she likes to win,' said Dale Ride.
After graduating from Westlake High School in Los Angeles, Ms. Ride went to Stanford University where she earned a degree in English as well as physics. A one-time junior tennis champion, she also played volleyball -- and rugby -- at Stanford.
The 5-5, 115-pound, blue-eyed brunette, who wears no makeup to work, is direct to the point of being flip in answering some questions.
'Being an astronaut was never a lifelong dream,' she said. 'There was an advertisement in the Stanford newspaper that NASA was accepting applications. I thought, 'Why not?''
She was polite when asked at an April 29, 1982, news conference at Johnson Space Center about being the first woman astronaut assigned to fly in space.
'It is quite an honor,' Ms. Ride said, but, 'I guess I was more excited about getting to fly early than about being the first woman.'
She also makes clear she thinks she's as good as any of the men.
'Aside from the obvious differences (between men and women astronauts), I don't think there are any. We've been through the same training.'
In addition to the jet pilot training that goes with the work, she obviously has mastered the politics of the astronaut corps, where the men have been known to tease the women unmercifully. (The women give it right back.)
Getting selected for a flight, a process never fully disclosed by NASA, is partly political since most of the candidates are equally qualified. Some of the men have been waiting more than a decade to fly.
One sign of Ms. Ride's political acumen is the way she ignores signs of sexist upbringing in the men around her.
At the news conference introducing the crew, Crippen, one of the most gracious astronauts ever to fly, refers to Ms. Ride as 'the prettiest' member of the crew and talks about the 'ladies.'
If the words rankle, Ms. Ride never shows it publicly.
She considers herself a beneficiary of the women's movement, although one gets the impression becoming openly involved with a political movement would not be to her taste.
'I was not an active participant in it,' she told one interviewer. 'But my career at Stanford and my selection as an astronaut would not have happened without the women's movement.'
