Bat, Baseball, Sally Ride

This child-sized baseball bat belonged to Dr. Sally K. Ride. Her maternal grandfather, Anders Anderson, made it to teach her how to swing and hit the ball when she was about seven years old. From a young age, Ride was athletic and passionate about sports. Her sister, Karen "Bear" Ride, believed that Ride's habit of memorizing and analyzing batting averages and pitching statistics bolstered her early interest in mathematics. Ride soon focused her attention on tennis, and as a college student she was a nationally ranked tennis player.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space when she flew on the STS-7 shuttle mission in 1983. Her second and last space mission was STS-41G in 1984. A physicist with a Ph.D., she joined the astronaut corps in 1978 in the first class of astronauts recruited specifically for the Space Shuttle Program. Viewed as a leader in the NASA community, she served on the Rogers Commission after the Challenger accident in 1986 and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003. She also led the task force that produced a visionary strategic planning report in 1987, titled “NASA Leadership and America’s Future in Space” but known popularly as the "Ride Report."

After she left NASA in 1987, Dr. Ride taught first at Stanford and later at the University of California, San Diego, where she also served as the director of the California Space Institute. Until her death in 2012, she was president and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she founded to promote science education.

Dr. Ride’s partner, Dr. Tam O’Shaughnessy, donated the baseball bat to the Museum in 2013.

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This page was imported from Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Released by the Smithsonian Institution under CC0 through Smithsonian Open Access.

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