📍Encino, Los Angeles, CA 91436, USA
1951 – 1968“I was born in May 1951 and grew up in Encino, a quiet suburb in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, the older of two daughters of Dale and Joyce Ride. My father taught political science at Santa Monica College, and my mother volunteered as a counsellor at a women's prison. Both were elders in the Presbyterian Church, and they encouraged my sister Bear and me to explore whatever interested us, without ever suggesting that some things were not for girls. I was a sporty, competitive child who played football and baseball in the street with the neighbourhood boys. My mother suggested tennis as a gentler option, and I took to it fiercely; at ten I was coached by the former champion Alice Marble, and I became one of the top junior players in the country. I also loved science and spent hours with a telescope looking at the stars. A partial tennis scholarship took me to Westlake School for Girls, where my science teacher, Elizabeth Mommaerts, showed me how exciting it could be to solve problems logically, and became a lifelong mentor. I thought about playing tennis professionally, but in the end I chose physics, studying at Stanford. In 1977 I answered a newspaper advertisement from NASA looking for astronauts, and in June 1983 I flew on the space shuttle Challenger, becoming the first American woman in space. Later, I founded a company to help girls and boys keep their love of science, just as my parents had encouraged mine in Encino.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
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