Ride on Sally Ride
Sally Ride was the first woman and the youngest American at the age of 32 to travel in space. She made two trips and was scheduled for her third when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. Sally Ride died this week from pancreatic cancer aged 61. We hear an excerpt from Sally Ride as broadcast on The Science Show in 1990.
Robyn Williams: Okay, get a piece of paper and write down this question and have the answer ready in 30 minutes. So, can you assign a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler distribution given that lambda is negative and moo is greater than phi and will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobold's constant? And the question is how close? You got it? Well, now you have 30 minutes, and away you go.
And this is of course The Science Show, and I see that the bloke in the beige anorak in Fitzroy has already got the answer. We'll come to that at the end, and I know you can't wait, it will be that sort of program, with plenty of Higgses and quantum fluctuations.
And a farewell. Vale to Sally Ride who rode in space twice, the youngest person in her time and the first American woman to fly. Here she is on The Science Show in 1990.
Sally Ride: The robotic missions are very obviously the best way to accomplish lots of things. For example, you're not going to get many volunteers to go to Neptune. I mean, those people that would volunteer you'd probably want to send anyway. There are a lot of things that can be done much more cheaply and much more efficiently with robots. Planetary exploration is one of those things, and I think that Earth remote sensing is another one in a lot of areas, particularly if you know what you're looking for and you already know how to build the instrument, then it's almost always cheaper to do it robotically than it is to send people.
The area where people are important is when you don't really know what you're looking for. The eye and the brain are actually very, very good at recognising patterns, flipping through the file index and saying 'I haven't seen that before'. And there have been several features in the ocean, for example, that have been discovered that are very important structures in the ocean that haven't been picked up by the sensors, that were noticed first by people because they said 'that looks odd'.
Having said that, I also think that it's very important to the country and just to the children in the country if no one else, to have a vibrant part of the human space program. Kids have to have something to look forward to and, believe me, I see a lot of kids who look forward to being astronauts. It might be astronauts today and firefighters tomorrow, but astronaut is something that kids like to aspire towards, and I think that every country needs to have some element of that to invigorate their population and their technology.
Robyn Williams: And Dr Sally Ride on convincing reluctant kids to study science and to stick with it.
Sally Ride: I do think that it's very important to attract young people to science and maths and engineering very early on. If you don't have them by junior high or high school you're not going to get them in most cases. So it's critically important to concentrate on their early years, even as early as mid-elementary school. And one of the things that I think the space program really has to offer is as a hook to get kids interested in science and maths. I mean, all kids are interested in the space program and dinosaurs, and you need to use that because you can really generate a lot of interest among seven, eight, nine, 10-year-olds if you attract them to the science courses with the space program and then use that without them noticing it to start teaching them some things about science and maths.
Robyn Williams: And now Dr Sally Ride on how much astronauts see of pollution and the increasing harm done to parts of the planet.
Sally Ride: First of all, I have only been up twice, although I guess I'm the only person in the room that can say that, and my two flights were very closely spaced, they were within about a year and a half of each other, and I didn't personally see any changes within that year and a half. People who have flown in both the Skylab flights of the mid-'70s and the space shuttle flights have seen significant changes in the levels of pollution, for example, and say that they were surprised at the differences and that they were so striking to them.
The things that I think all astronauts have seen that really catch their attention are pollution of the cities, the fires that you see all up and down the coast of Africa and across the Amazon Basin. You can really see the effects of what we are doing to the planet. You'd like to think that those are reversible and, as people become more and more aware that their little fire is contributing to something on a global scale, that we will be able to make prudent decisions, stop those things, and that everything will be reversible. But things aren't always that simple.
For example, a lot of the trace gases have very long residence times in the atmosphere, so even if you decide today that you're not going to put any more trace gases into the atmosphere, you have already done something that will persist for several years, tens of years, hundreds of years in some cases. So it's very difficult to say which changes will be reversible and which changes won't.
Robyn Williams: One of my heroes, Dr Sally Ride, the youngest astronaut in her time and the first American woman in space. She died on Tuesday. Sally Ride was a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.
- Robyn Williams
- David Fisher