June 18th
On the morning of June 18, 1983, a 32-year-old physicist named Sally Ride strapped herself into the Space Shuttle Challenger, sitting atop millions of pounds of explosive fuel, and waited for the most thunderous ride of her life. Outside the launch pad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, a crowd of half a million had gathered. Many of them held signs reading “Ride, Sally, Ride.” In a few moments, the soft-spoken Californian would become the first American woman to fly into space.
It had not been an easy road to that launch pad. When NASA finally opened its astronaut corps to women in the late 1970s, Ride was one of just six chosen from a pool of thousands. She had answered a newspaper ad while finishing her doctorate in physics at Stanford. But earning her seat aboard Challenger meant enduring a barrage of questions no male astronaut ever faced. Reporters asked whether spaceflight would damage her reproductive organs, whether she cried when things went wrong, and whether she planned to wear makeup in orbit. Ride met it all with the same patient, slightly amused composure. “It’s too bad,” she once observed, “that this is such a big deal.”
At 7:33 a.m., the engines ignited. Challenger climbed into the Florida sky on a pillar of fire, and Sally Ride was gone — punching through the clouds and into the history books. Over the next six days, she and her four crewmates orbited the Earth, deployed communications satellites, and ran experiments. Ride became the first person to operate the shuttle’s robotic arm to retrieve a satellite from open space, a delicate maneuver she had helped design herself.
When Challenger touched down in the California desert on June 24, Ride had logged more than 147 hours in orbit and shattered a barrier that had stood since the dawn of the American space program. Twenty years earlier — almost to the day — the Soviet Union had launched the world’s first woman into space. America had finally caught up, and it had done so on the shoulders of a brilliant, unassuming scientist who simply wanted to fly.
Sally Ride flew once more aboard Challenger before turning to a life of teaching and inspiring young people, especially girls, to chase careers in science. She never sought the spotlight, but she understood what her flight meant. Somewhere, in the crowd of half a million who watched her rise that June morning, were countless little girls who learned in an instant that the sky was no longer the limit.
Also On This Day…
1815 — Napoleon Meets His Waterloo On June 18, 1815, on a rain-soaked field near the Belgian village of Waterloo, the most feared military genius in Europe gambled his empire and lost. Napoleon Bonaparte, freshly returned from exile, threw his 72,000 French troops against the Duke of Wellington’s allied army. In a fateful error, Napoleon delayed his attack until midday to let the muddy ground dry — and those lost hours allowed the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher to march to the battlefield and tip the scales. By nightfall the French were shattered and in full retreat. Within days Napoleon abdicated for the final time and was banished to the remote island of St. Helena, where he died. To this day, to “meet your Waterloo” means to face the defeat from which there is no return.
1812 — America Declares Its Second War for Independence On June 18, 1812, President James Madison signed a declaration of war against Great Britain, plunging the young United States into a conflict that would test whether the nation could survive. Fed up with the British navy seizing American sailors off their own ships and choking American trade, Congress narrowly approved the measure after days of bitter debate. The War of 1812 would see the British burn the White House and the Capitol to the ground — and would also give America the dramatic defense of Fort McHenry that inspired Francis Scott Key to pen “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In a cruel twist of timing, Britain had moved to ease the very trade restrictions that sparked the war just days later, but word arrived too late to stop the fighting.
1873 — A Suffragist Refuses to Pay for the Crime of Voting On June 18, 1873, the trial of Susan B. Anthony came to its rigged conclusion in a Canandaigua, New York courtroom. Anthony’s offense: she had cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election, insisting the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed her right as a citizen to vote. The judge, who had written his verdict before the trial even began, refused to let the jury deliberate and declared her guilty, fining her $100. Anthony rose and delivered her unforgettable reply: “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” She never did — and the judge, fearing she would use prison as a path to the Supreme Court, quietly declined to enforce it. It would take another 47 years, but the amendment securing a woman’s right to vote would one day bear her name.
From a young physicist riding a column of fire into orbit, to an emperor’s empire crumbling in the Belgian mud, to a defiant woman who would not pay a dollar for the right to be counted — June 18th is a day of barriers broken and barriers built. It reminds us that history turns on the courage of those who refuse to accept the limits the world hands them.
