Wikipedia article of the day for May 26, 2026

The Wikipedia article of the day for May 26, 2026 is Sally Ride.
Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the third woman and the first American woman to fly in space. A graduate of Stanford University, where she earned a PhD in physics in 1978, she was selected as a mission specialist with NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first class of NASA astronauts to include women. She flew in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission in 1983 and the STS-41-G mission in 1984. She left NASA in 1987 and worked at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control, and then at the University of California, San Diego, researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the losses of Challenger and of Columbia, and was the only person to participate in both investigations. She is the first astronaut known to have been LGBTQ, a fact that she hid until her death from pancreatic cancer in 2012.