Sally Ride

From Yahoo:"Sally Ride Remembered: Tributes to 1st American Woman in Space"

Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, died Monday (July 23) at the age of 61.

Ride made history when she launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission in 1983. She became only the third woman to ever travel in space, after Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Ride traveled into space once more in 1984, as a member of the STS-41G crew on the space shuttle Challenger. Over the course of her career, Ride logged a total of 343 hours in space. Sally Ride's death came after 17 months of battling pancreatic cancer.

^ I was too young to remember when she went into space and only learned a brief summary of her space flight years later in school. Despite that I think it's good to remember what she did. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/sally-ride-remembered-tributes-1st-american-woman-space-002746338.html