A set of memorabilia chronicling Sally Ride’s pioneering path to space just fetched a pretty penny at auction.
In June 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to reach the final frontier, on the STS-7 mission of the space shuttle Challenger.
She rode Challenger to space again in October 1984, on the STS-41-G mission. This flight was groundbreaking as well; it was the first spaceflight ever to feature two female crewmembers. (The other woman in the seven-person crew was NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan.)
Some mementoes from these flights, and from the path that Ride — a physicist with a doctorate from Stanford University — took to the launch pad came up for auction last Thursday (June 26) in Los Angeles. And there was quite a bit of interest.
The mementoes — a set of more than 50 pieces called the Sally Ride Estate Collection — sold for a total of $145,666, according to Nate D. Sanders Auctions, which organized the event.
The 1978 acceptance letter that welcomed Ride as a member of NASA’s Astronaut Group 8 — the first one in the agency’s history to include women — brought $5,046. Her official astronaut badge sold for $4,915, and the diary she kept during the STS-41-G mission went for $9,694.
Even more lucrative was Ride’s Apollo 11 Robbins medal, which flew to the moon and back during the iconic first-ever crewed lunar landing mission in 1969; it sold for $17,690. Another Robbins medal that Ride owned, which flew on the first-ever space shuttle mission in April 1981, sold for $13,401.
You can peruse the collection, and the price that each piece brought, via Nate D. Sanders Auctions.
Ride, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61 in 2012, was a pioneer in more ways than one: She’s also the first known LGBTQ+ person to reach the final frontier.
Ride did not reveal her sexual orientation during her spaceflight career; the revelation came via an obituary published just after her death by Sally Ride Science, the STEM outreach company she launched with Tam O’Shaughnessy in 2001. That obituary identified O’Shaughnessy as Ride’s life partner and said they had been together for 27 years.