Lesbian Astronaut

[Deepwater6]

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/26/opinion/darrah-sally-ride-lesbian/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

 

First of all as you'll read in the article Sally Ride choose to keep her personal sexual orientation to herself. I'm sure she would not appreciate her fellow "team mate" putting out a story on the front page of CNN news. It doesn't reveal who "some people" are that say she should have come out before she died to encourage young people struggle with their sexiality.

 

I do not care for this kind of lifestyle, but that is only my personal opinion. I also do not have issue with people engaged in such relationships. It's a free country, if that's what puts the icing on your cake so be it. I think you should be able to pursue what ever you would like on this planet. I only have two requests and they are the same requests I have about religion. 1. Don't break the law doing it. 2. Don't try and push it on me.

 

In the movie "Fourth of July" with Will Smith he is told that if he marries a an exotic dancer he is dating he will never get accepted into the space shuttle program. I realize in her time it could have hindered Ride's carrer and she did what she had to do. I would hope by now we are at the point that we are sending astronauts based on their talent for the mission. I would hope that people are selected on their ability and that ability supercedes any personal lifestyle. If the best group for the mission is 6 Anglo Saxon men then that's who should go. If 6 transexual Dwarfs are the best and brightest for the next mission send them.

 

As we learned in DADT debate alot of military personnel stated that they didn't care if the person in foxhole next to them was gay as long as they had their back. There are alot of stories of gay soldiers doing things in the field which required valor. I'm sure it would be no different in space.

[belovelife]

wow

[CraigD]

First of all as you'll read in the article Sally Ride choose to keep her personal sexual orientation to herself. I'm sure she would not appreciate her fellow "team mate" putting out a story on the front page of CNN news.

I don’t believe Sally Ride would have been offended by articles like the linked CNN one.

 

Although exact details of the execution of her will are unavailable – rightly, as wills are not, unless explicitly made so, public documents – it appears that Ride stated in hers her wish that her relationship of “partner” with Tam O'Shaughnessy, an psychologist, educator, and chief officer of the Sally Ride’s science foundation, be made public. I don’t know if Ride and P’Shaughnessy’s motives for making this post-mortem announcement (we can reasonably assume, I think, that they reached the decision together) will ever be, or need or should be, publicly known, but there appears to me to be no doubt that both freely consented to it.

 

That said, I was shocked, both that Ride, a superbly healthy, athletic, educated, smart woman only nine years older than me, died, and that she was a lesbian.

 

Upon reading that she died of pancreatic cancer, I’m was saddened but not surprised, as even with best present day routine health care, it is a terribly difficult disease to diagnose and treat (average 1 year survival rate 25%, 5 year survival 5%), and little in known about its causes and prevention. Pancreatic cancer is among the diseases that have lead me to promote full-body imaging diagnostics, as this slowly-advancing medical technology is IMHO the most promising to greatly improve the chances of surviving difficult-to-detect diseases like this. My wife having survived kidney cancer almost certainly only because of a serendipitous find in an ultrasound image taken to diagnose an unrelated condition is another motivator. The cool imaginary machines in the old Star Trek TV shows is another.

 

I felt a mild sting at the announcement of Ride’s sexual orientation, because, like many 1980s spaceflight enthusiasts, I had a mild, distant crush on her then. Her 1982 marriage to astronaut Steve Hawley hinted, to space-struck youth of my ilk, at the vague possibility of her availability. Ride and Hawley’s private lives were very private: though I remember their marriage was widely announced, I only just learned that they divorced in 1987 (even wikipedia didn’t know ‘til Feb 2006).

 

Even if I was little aware of her personal life and post-Challenger investigation spaceflight and science career, I’ll sadly miss Sally Ride. For me, she’ll always epitomize the phrase “the right stuff”.