GREEN Reactor: Legacy of Sally’s Rides
Sally Ride on the job
Anyone who’s followed my various Key West columns or pages knows I started my career working on the Space Shuttle program at Kennedy Space Center. My LPS (Launch Processing System) code aided in Shuttle checkout and launches, and I was fortunate enough to be able to watch up-close and personal the launches of the first dozen shuttle missions (through the first launch of Discovery). Ultimately two of the Shuttles I worked with were tragically lost, but Discovery flew 39 missions over the next quarter century.
There were many “firsts” during those early years, but other than the first Shuttle launch itself, the most significant was undoubtedly the launch of STS 7 on June 16, 1983, where Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. (That happened to be exactly 20 years and 2 days after the Russians had launched Valentina Tereshkova in a dual-launch “man and woman in space” stunt.) Sally joined the then-record crew of five in the Challenger spacecraft for its second flight, which included deployment of two satellites from the payload bay. During that mission Sally was the first person to pluck a satellite from orbit — using the Shuttle’s “robot arm” to grab it and store it in the bay – and return it to earth.
Other than a nicked window (from space debris) and a landing weather wave-off to California (spoiling the planned first landing in Florida), the mission went very smoothly. Sally then went up in Challenger again the next year in the first US two-woman mission with Kathryn Sullivan (who did America’s first female Space Walk). Next, Sally trained hard for another mission that was cancelled after the Challenger tragedy, but she was called upon to join the team investigating that disaster. After spending time in NASA planning and writing a book, she left the program in 1987 after 10 years of training and service.
Sally held a PhD in Physics and for all of her following years was an outspoken proponent of encouraging young women to pursue studies and careers in the sciences. Even while teaching and directing the Space Institute she continued to focus on educating our youth in the sciences — in areas that are important to human progress, to solving the problems that face our planet and the people who live on it. Indeed just after the turn of the century she created the company Sally Ride Science to develop such programs for elementary and middle school kids.
Five years ago this week, upon the 25th anniversary of her epic flight, she looked backward at where she’d been, and FORWARD toward our future. The accompanying video covers both. The first half gives a good look at the perspectives discussed above, but it’s the second half of this video that inspired me to write this piece. After discussing the programs she helped establish to allow school children to actually study the earth from space (via direct manipulation of space-residing cameras), she gives us a good look at how much the world has changed just in the short time that we’ve had these cameras available to us. Those changes – driven by mankind – are shocking.
Besides the build-up of population centers and destruction caused by massive dams (required to gather water to support growing populations), there is CLEAR irrefutable documenting pictures of the ill effects of man-driven climate change. Melting glaciers. Expanding deserts. Shrinking ice-caps. Flooding. Sally sounded the warning bell that we all need to hear and understand. Unfortunately those calls came at the precise time that our country’s economic stability was shattering, and the soon to be elected progressive President would evoke the wrath of the Teapublicans.
Whereas Sally observed the problems and expressed a confidence that we had the skills and technologies to confront them, these regressive politicians would have nothing of it. Where she showed optimism about a successful future once we got started, these newly elected nay-sayers expressed skepticism about the very existence of the problem. And they threw up road-block after road-block during the very time that we should have been accelerating our efforts. Here we are five years after her forewarnings and we have made little progress in many areas, have made NEGATIVE progress in others.
When Sally died of pancreatic cancer last year, in all likelihood she was very disappointed about our lack of progress – perhaps the frustration pushed her decline faster than it may have happened. (Of course this is pure speculation.) But regardless of HER feelings, WE should all be extremely disappointed that we’re making little progress toward saving the planet. We, who are RESPONSIBLE for its sorry state are spending our time arguing with people who don’t even realize that they’re being manipulated by the Big Dirty Energy interests whose greed blinds them to THEIR OWN fate.
We must all hope that the messages Sally and others have tried to get through to the youth of the world will reap a harvest of young adults not blinded by the idiocy of OUR generation. And those of us who are not so selfish as to thoughtlessly pass on this crisis to our children’s children must redouble our efforts to wash away this last bastion of backward-thinkers, who are holding back our pursuit of the cure.