“The view of Earth is spectacular.”
Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, was born on May 26, 1951, in Los Angeles, California. When she later made her historic journey aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983, she did not just break a cosmic glass ceiling; she also became the youngest American astronaut to ever orbit the planet at that point in history, at just thirty-two years old. Ride was an accomplished tennis player who once considered turning professional, but she ultimately traded her tennis racket for a physics textbook and a seat on a rocket.
Image of Sally in 1983 via Wikimedia Commons, public domain