Sally Ride, first U.S. woman in space, to speak at SWT

SAN MARCOS, TEXAS — Former astronaut Sally K. Ride, the first U.S. woman in space, will lecture Feb. 7 at Southwest Texas State University.

Ride will deliver the second annual James Lovell Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 7, at SWT’s Evans Auditorium. The event is sponsored by the James and Marilyn Lovell Center for Environmental Geography and Hazards Research, located in the university’s Department of Geography.

Lovell, a former astronaut and commander of Apollo 13, inaugurated the lecture series a year ago. He will be present to introduce Ride.

Advance ticket sales will be held from 4 to 8 p.m. in the Evans Auditorium lobby on Tuesday, Feb. 1. Advance tickets are $5 for the general public and $2 for college students. Tickets the day of the event will go on sale at 6:30 p.m. in the Evans Auditorium box office. The cost at the door is $7 for general admission and $3 for college students. Students in grades K-12 will be admitted free.

Ride’s speech will be preceded at 5 p.m. by a fund-raising dinner in SWT’s LBJ Student Center ballroom. Tickets for the dinner are $100 per person, $175 per couple or $750 for a table for eight. Reservations are required by Feb. 1 and may be made by calling Angelika Lester at (512) 245-2170.

Ride became the first American woman in space on the shuttle Challenger’s 1983 mission. Her next flight was an eight-day mission in 1984, again on Challenger. She has more than 343 hours of space flight.

Ride served on the presidential commission charged with investigating the Challenger explosion. She then became a NASA administrator, creating that agency’s Office of Exploration and producing a report on the future of the space program.

She is currently director of the California Space Institute and a professor of physics at the University of California-San Diego.