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Sally Ride to be 1st Woman in space ?...
Sally Ride to be 1st Woman in space ?...
Item # 710110
January 17, 1978
SAN JOSE MERCURY, California, Jan. 17, 1978
* Stanford University student Sally Ride
* Selected to be a possible future astronaut
* First American Woman to fly in space fame
* Future NASA space program icon w/ photo
The bottom of the front page has a four column heading: "3 Central Coast scientists on astronaut list" with a photo of a young Sally Ride, a student at Stanford University at the time. Ride would become the 1st American Woman to fly in space 5 years later. I guessing the only reason this publication reported this was because San Jose is about 30 minutes away from Stanford University. I suspect this to be an extremely rare item because their was really no reason to save it at the time.
Complete 1st section only with 16 pages, good condition.
wikipedia notes: In January 1977, Ride spotted an article on the front page of The Stanford Daily that told how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was recruiting a new group of astronauts for the Space Shuttle program and wanted to recruit women. No women had previously been NASA astronauts, although the Soviet Union's cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had flown in space in 1963. Ride mailed a request for, and received the application forms.
Ride was one of 8,079 applications NASA received by the June 30, 1977, deadline. She then became one of 208 finalists. Her physical fitness impressed the doctors. They also placed her in a Personal Rescue Enclosure to see if she suffered from claustrophobia. She was asked to write a one-page essay on why she wanted to become an astronaut. Finally, she was interviewed by the selection committee. On January 16, 1978, she received a phone call from George Abbey, NASA's director of flight operations, who informed her that she had been selected as part of NASA Astronaut Group 8. She was one of 35 astronaut candidates in the group, of whom six were women.
Category: The 20th Century
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