On this day in space! June 18, 1983: Sally Ride becomes America's 1st woman in space

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On June 18, 1983, NASA astronaut Sally Ride became America's first woman in space.

On June 18, 1983, NASA astronaut Sally Ride became America's first woman in space after she and four colleagues blasted off on the space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission.

The astronauts spent 6 days in space and deployed two communications satellites for Indonesia and Canada.

Floating freely on the flight deck, Sally Ride communicates with ground controllers in Houston during her STS-7 mission in June 1983. (Image credit: NASA)

Ride became the first woman to operate Canadarm, the shuttle's robotic arm. She used it to deploy a Shuttle Pallet Satellite that was loaded with science experiments, and later used it again to bring the satellite back inside the shuttle. They returned to Earth on June 24.

Ride later became the first American woman to travel a second time when she launched on another Challenger mission, STS-41G, in 1984. Ride also served as president of Space.com from 1999 to 2000.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.