First and foremost, throughout her career as an astronaut, Sally intended on breaking barriers against women. Lynn shear acclaimed, “Sally Ride, the heroic astronaut, was a complex person who broke through many of life’s barriers—and not just at male-dominated NASA (65). In January
1978, she was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA. She was one of the six female candidates picked for the job. Her job with NASA was to work with robotic arms that helped deploy and retrieve satellites from space. Ride’s history- making Challenger on June 18, 1983, wasn’t her only mission to outer space. She also was the first American woman to travel to space a second time on October 5, 1984 on another Challenger mission, the STS-41-G. After great accomplishments and many achievements, she left NASA in 1987.