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Yesterday, Today and Tomorrows Courage
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As a member of the International Women’s Air & Space Museum, two stories surfaced yesterday that are important points in the history of aviation. The revived search for Amelia Earhart’s plane in the Pacific and Sally Ride’s passing are incredibly significant. These that really highlight how far advancements in aviation, and gender equality have come.
The mystery of Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 has lead to a number of theories and fiction, yet her place in history is a treasure we all share. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery is returning to Hawaii from the Kiribati atoll of Nikumaroro, without conclusive images of Earhart’s plane they were hoping to attain. According to the Associated Press, the group’s president, Pat Thrasher said, “This is just sort of the way things are in this world. It’s not like an Indiana Jones flick where you go through a door and there it is.” Unlike a relic Indy works to unearth, Earhart’s life work lives beyond whatever parts of her plane lie in a remote reef.
Less than fifty years after Earhart left us, Sally Ride became the first woman in space. After a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, the world lost Sally Ride yesterday, a true pioneer in aviation. The NASA press release said of Ride, “The soft-spoken California physicist broke the gender barrier 29 years ago when she rode to orbit aboard space shuttle Challenger to become America’s first woman in space.”
Of her place in history Ride recalled, “On launch day [June 18, 1983, when she rocketed into space on Challenger’s STS-7 , there was so much excitement and so much happening around us in crew quarters, even on the way to the launch pad,” she said. “I didn’t really think about it that much at the time . . . but I came to appreciate what an honor it was to be selected to be the first to get a chance to go into space.”
Just last month, China sent Liu Yang, the county’s first female astronaut into space as part of their ambitious space exploration program.
Like finding Earhart’s plane after all these years, I look forward to future generations viewing Ride’s accomplishments with her gender as a quaint reminder of times past. Jen Doll of The Atlantic Wire said of Ride’s career, “we truly have journeyed light years from where we began. When pioneers can stop being pioneers and are just people, then we've really won.”
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