A year after her first voyage she successfully returned to space in the same shuttle for an eight-day mission. She was training for a third mission when disaster struck the Challenger shuttle at the Kennedy Space Centre in 1986 and the programme was suspended.
Six of her colleagues died in the disaster along with a schoolteacher who was participating in a mission to become the first person to teach from space.
Dr Ride, a star physicist who was accepted onto the space programme in 1978 after answering an advertisement for astronauts in a newspaper, was a member of the team that investigated the incident. She later sat on the panel investigating the Columbia crash in 2003.
Charles Bolden, a former astronaut who is now the administrator of Nasa, said she would be missed but “her star will always shine brightly”.
"Sally Ride broke barriers with grace and professionalism – and literally changed the face of America's space programme," he added.
[SUP]Astronaut Sally Ride monitors control panels from the pilot's chair on the flight deck of the Space Shuttle Challenger (Nasa)[/SUP]
Dr Ride grew up in Los Angeles and went to Stanford University, where she earned degrees in physics and English.
In 1989 she left Nasa and became a professor at Stanford and set up Sally Ride Science in San Diego, a science hub for young people.
She also wrote five science books for children and served on dozens of Nasa, space and technology advisory panels.
Ride's sister and a spokeswoman for Sally Ride Science, the organisation led by Ride and O'Shaughnessy, later reportedly confirmed that Ride was gay.
"I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them," Sally Ride's sister, Bear Ride, told the Buzz Feed news website.
Ride is survived by her mother, O'Shaughnessy, a sister, a niece and a nephew.
Six of her colleagues died in the disaster along with a schoolteacher who was participating in a mission to become the first person to teach from space.
Dr Ride, a star physicist who was accepted onto the space programme in 1978 after answering an advertisement for astronauts in a newspaper, was a member of the team that investigated the incident. She later sat on the panel investigating the Columbia crash in 2003.
Charles Bolden, a former astronaut who is now the administrator of Nasa, said she would be missed but “her star will always shine brightly”.
"Sally Ride broke barriers with grace and professionalism – and literally changed the face of America's space programme," he added.
[SUP]Astronaut Sally Ride monitors control panels from the pilot's chair on the flight deck of the Space Shuttle Challenger (Nasa)[/SUP]
Dr Ride grew up in Los Angeles and went to Stanford University, where she earned degrees in physics and English.
In 1989 she left Nasa and became a professor at Stanford and set up Sally Ride Science in San Diego, a science hub for young people.
She also wrote five science books for children and served on dozens of Nasa, space and technology advisory panels.
Ride's sister and a spokeswoman for Sally Ride Science, the organisation led by Ride and O'Shaughnessy, later reportedly confirmed that Ride was gay.
"I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them," Sally Ride's sister, Bear Ride, told the Buzz Feed news website.
Ride is survived by her mother, O'Shaughnessy, a sister, a niece and a nephew.