Word: astronautical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviets launched a woman cosmonaut precisely 20 years ago, though a second did not follow until last summer (see box). "It's too bad," scowls Ride, "that society isn't to the point yet where the country could just send up a woman astronaut and nobody would think twice about...
...spite of encouragement from Billie Jean King, Ride decided to quit tennis and go on to full-time graduate studies in astrophysics at Stanford. By 1978 she had a doctorate but no job. When NASA advertised for the first time in ten years for astronaut-scientists, she became one of 8,370 applicants. After grueling physical and mental examinations, including a session with two NASA psychiatrists who tried to crack her now celebrated composure, Ride was one of 35 candidates picked, six of them women. The other female "Ascans" (NASA slang for astronaut candidates) were equally talented: Judith Resnik...
...other women demonstrated their mettle-actually she had spent many hours in graduate school at computer terminals-Bean had a change of heart. The women, he finally agreed, performed as well as the men. In 1980, encouraged by the female experience, NASA added two more women to the astronaut corps...
...early 1950s, University of Washington Psychiatrist Thomas Holmes determined that the single common denominator for stress, even for an astronaut, is "the necessity of significant change in the life pattern of the individual." Holmes found that among tuberculosis patients, for example, the onset of the disease had generally followed a cluster of disruptive events: a death in the family, a new job, marriage. Stress did not cause the illness, Holmes emphasizes-"It takes a germ"-but tension did seem to promote the disease process. Holmes discovered that merely discussing upsetting events could produce physiological changes. An experiment in which sample...
Sally Ride, 32, astronaut set to be the first U.S. woman in space on the second voyage of the shuttle Challenger, asked at a press conference if she will weep in tough situations: "Why doesn't anyone ask Rick [Hauck, her fellow astronaut] those questions...