Sally Ride - After NASA

After NASA

In 1987, Ride left her position in Washington, D.C., to work at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of the California Space Institute. During the mid-1990s until her death, Ride led the public outreach efforts of the ISS EarthKAM and GRAIL MoonKAM projects in cooperation with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UCSD, which permitted middle school students to study imagery of the Earth and moon. In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She was the president and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she co-founded in 2001 that creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls.

According to Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned of the technical problems that led to the Challenger accident, Ride was the only public figure to show support for him when he went public with his pre-disaster warnings (after the entire workforce of Morton-Thiokol shunned him). Sally Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for his efforts.

Ride wrote or co-wrote five books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.

Ride endorsed Barack Obama for President in 2008. She was a member of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, an independent review requested by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on May 7, 2009.

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