Ride urges girls to look to science

These days, the first American woman in space is helping other girls reach for the stars.

“Fundamentally, science is just curiosity,” Sally Ride told a Spokane audience Thursday. Throughout grade school, girls have just as many unanswered questions as boys, she said. But something happens to them in middle school that turns them away from science and engineering.

Ride is trying to do something about that.

In 1977, while pursuing her doctorate in physics at Stanford University, she noticed an ad in the student newspaper. NASA was not only looking for applicants to its astronaut program for the first time in 10 years, it was accepting woman applicants for the first time ever.

“I knew it was what I wanted to do,” she told nearly 300 people gathered for a Valley Rotary Club luncheon and fund-raiser at the Davenport Hotel.

Out of 8,000 applicants to the space program, Ride said, she was one of eight women among 35 chosen. Today, a quarter of the program is comprised of women, who are represented in every aspect of National Aeronautics and Space Administration. That may not seem like that much, she said, but it is better female representation than you will find at any high-tech company in America.

Only 11 percent of all engineers and 20 percent of scientists are women, Ride said. Companies are frantically trying to recruit women out of college, but high schools are not turning out women interested in science.

“In the fifth, sixth and seventh grades, we are losing both boys and girls” who are interested in science and engineering, she said. But the number of girls falls off at a much higher rate.

The reasons, Ride said, are societal. An 11-year-old girl who says she wants to be an electrical engineer when she grows up is not viewed as positively as a boy with the same aspirations.

“They need support, they need role models and they need mentors,” she said.

Ride, 53, first flew into space as part of the 1983 Challenger crew and returned aboard the same shuttle in 1984. She was preparing for her third mission when the Challenger exploded in 1986 with two women aboard. Ride was appointed to the presidential commission charged with investigating the accident.

Today, Ride is a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego. She also founded Imaginary Lines, a company that creates events, programs and products for young people interested in science. The company and Hasbro sponsor an annual national toy-design competition for children in grades five through eight. Half of the hundreds of contestants are girls.

“A whole bunch of normal kids spend several months being engineers and don’t know it,” Ride said, adding that her company tells girls interested in science and engineering that they are not alone. “There are thousands of others.”

Ride spoke Thursday at a Valley Rotary Club fund-raiser for the group’s Upward Bound program, which pairs students at risk of dropping out of school with Rotary mentors through high school. Upon graduation, the students can be eligible for post-secondary scholarships. This is the second year of the program, which adds three “at risk” students a year.

Taking questions from the audience, Ride was asked what she thought was the future of the space program.

“The space shuttle is old but still works better than anything else we’ve got,” she said. “We need something new.

“Maybe, we should be looking beyond Earth orbit.”

She said through President Bush’s space initiative NASA hopes to see Americans back on the moon by 2016 or 2017 and possibly on Mars after that.

“We are an exploring people,” she said. “The space program shows what a country can do when we put our minds to it.”