America's first woman in space dies aged 61 Sally Ride
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She also wrote five science books for children and served on dozens of Nasa, space and technology advisory panels.
BHR HollyWood Reports America’s first female astronaut to enter space has died after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 61.
In an obituary on her website, Sally Ride publicly outed herself as homosexual for the first time, naming her partner of 27-years as Tam O’Shaughnessy.
Ride's sister and a spokesman for Sally Ride Science, the organisation led by Ride and O'Shaughnessy, later reportedly confirmed that Ride was gay.
"I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them," Sally Ride's sister, Bear Ride, told the Buzz Feed news website.
Ride was 32 years old when in 1983 she became the first American woman - and also the youngest - to fly to space alongside four other crew members. The five astronauts flew aboard Challenger, the ill-fated space shuttle that exploded in Cape Canaveral 73 seconds after take-off three years later.
Robert L Crippen, who commanded the 1983 mission, said he chose Dr Ride because of her expertise with robotics and her ability to maintain her cool under extreme pressure. During the mission she was the crew member who operated a roBotic arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite.
When the team took off a crowd of 250,000 watched the launch, with many cheering and singing "Ride Sally Ride" from the Mack Rice song "Mustang Sally".
A year after her first voyage she successfully returned to space in the same shuttle for an eight-day mission. She was training for a third mission when disaster struck the Challenger shuttle at the Kennedy Space Centre in 1986 and the programme was suspended.
Six of her colleagues died in the disaster along with a schoolteacher who was participating in a mission to become the first person to teach from space.
Dr Ride, a star physicist who was accepted onto the space programme in 1978 after answering an advertisement for astronauts in a newspaper, was a member of the team that investigated the incident. She later sat on the panel investigating the Columbia crash in 2003.
Charles Bolden, a former astronaut who is now the administrator of Nasa, said she would be missed but “her star will always shine brightly”.
"Sally Ride broke barriers with grace and professionalism – and literally changed the face of America's space programme," he added.
Dr Ride grew up in Los Angeles and went to Stanford University, where she earned degrees in physics and English.
In 1989 she left Nasa and became a professor at Stanford and set up Sally Ride Science in San Diego, a science hub for young people.
Ride is survived by her mother, O'Shaughnessy, a sister, a niece and a nephew. By Amy Willis, Los Angeles/ telegraphnews I'm Big Blac This is Your BHR HollyWood Report
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