Sally Ride was born in Los Angeles, California, plus grew up in the suburban community of Encino in the San Fernando Valley. In addition to being an excellent student with a strong interest in science, she was a talented athlete. At age 10, she began playing tennis, a sport at which she particularly excelled. She became a nationally ranked junior tennis player plus attended Westlake School for Girls on a tennis scholarship. After graduation, she enrolled at Swarthmore University in Pennsylvania but soon doubted her choice, wondering if she was missing the opportunity for a professional tennis career. Determined to find out, she left Swarthmore after her first year to see how far her tennis game would take her. After three months of intense training, she concluded that she would not have a professional athletic career plus enrolled at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. She graduated with bachelor’s degrees in both English plus physics, plus remained at Stanford to earn a master’s plus a Ph.D. in physics. As a graduate student, she carried out research in astrophysics plus free-electron laser physics.
From childhood, Sally Ride had been fascinated with space exploration, but throughout the Mercury, Gemini, plus Apollo space flight programs, the ranks of the astronaut corps had been closed to women. From its inception, the National Aeronautics plus Space Administration (NASA) had recruited its astronauts from the ranks of military test pilots.
This changed in 1977 when NASA set out to recruit more scientists, including women, for the new Space Shuttle program. At 27, Ride was completing her Ph.D. when she saw an article in the Stanford University student newspaper, saying that NASA was seeking recruits for the astronaut corps. She saw the opportunity of a lifetime. She was one of more than 8,000 applicants for only 35 positions, but to her astonishment, she made the cut, plus was one of only six women accepted for astronaut training that began in the summer of 1978.