May 26--Google is commemorating what would have been the 64th birthday of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, with five "doodles" on its search page Tuesday.
In two of the doodles, little girls float up from the ground, as if traveling in space.
"I hope I've been able to capture some of the wonders that Sally must have felt up there floating free above it all," the artist of the doodles, Olivia Huynh, explained in a short video.
On June 18, 1983, Ride became the first American woman to travel into space.
"I never even imagined I could be an astronaut," Ride said in a Chicago Tribune story in April 1983, several months before her historic space mission.
"I guess because I just assumed there would never be a place for women."
After her career at NASA, she retired and started Sally Ride Science, where she encouraged young people and especially girls to enter fields related to science and technology, Huynh said.
"Once a young girl asked her what it was like to be weightless in space," her life partner Tam O'Shaughnessy, was quoted in the video as saying.
"Sally asked the students to imagine that suddenly gravity was not holding them down. The students were mesmerized. Now imagine floating up out of your seats, bumping into each other and rising to the ceiling. Sally encouraged the same freedom in their lives and inspired them to pursue what they loved and change the world by doing so," O'Shaughnessy said.
Ride died of pancreatic cancer July 23, 2012.
mmrodriguez@tribune.com
@merjourn
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