Sally Ride — in bronze — comes to Cradle of Aviation Museum

Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, towered over the entrance to the Cradle of Aviation Museum as her statue was unveiled at the Uniondale institution Friday.

In bronze, a 7-foot Ride wearing NASA flight gear reaches up, lifting a small space shuttle with her right hand as if into the heavens where she made history in 1983 as a crew member on the shuttle Challenger.

“It's going to give us an opportunity to focus on Sally Ride's contributions beyond just being a shuttle astronaut,” Andrew Parton, president of the museum, said Friday of the statue. “The stories of Sally Ride hopefully will inspire more kids, especially young girls, to really look at STEM as a career path,” Parton said, referring to the abbreviation for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Born Los Angeles in 1951, Ride received four degrees from Stanford University including a doctorate in physics while in her 20s. NASA selected her to be an astronaut candidate in 1978 and on June 18, 1983, she flew into space as a mission specialist on the space shuttle Challenger. She returned to orbit on the shuttle in 1984 and later served on the presidential commission investigating the Challenger explosion in 1986. She later taught physics at the University of California in San Diego and served as director of the California Space Institute. As an author and entrepreneur, she sought to inspire girls and young women to go into science and math. She died in 2012 from pancreatic cancer.

The Ride statue was the brainchild of Santa Monica documentary filmmaker Steven Barber, whose boyhood love of space missions drove him to raise money for previous bronze monuments to astronauts in the Apollo 11 and 13 missions.

Barber said he was struck by the lack of monuments to women who had gone into space or worked at NASA and seeing a meme about Sally Ride during the pandemic inspired him to build a monument to her.

“Millions of women come through all these science museums, from the Kennedy Space Center, to the Johnson Space Center to the beautiful Cradle and there's really nothing for any of them, except some pictures and some memorabilia,” Barber said. He thought, “Let's build something  substantive. Let's build something that will last.”

Barber reached out to the Cradle of Aviation Museum, which was receptive to the idea, and he raised the $300,000 needed to cast the statue. Barber had previously worked with sculptors George and Mark Lundeen of Loveland, Colorado, on the other astronaut sculptures and tapped them again, along with artist Joey Bainer also of Loveland.

The artists said they used hundreds of photographs to create Ride’s pose and likeness.

“If you look at pictures of Sally, she always had this big smile,” Mark Lundeen said of her sculpted face.

Four girls who won an essay contest held by the museum on Ride's legacy helped unveil the statue at a ceremony Friday.

“She is such an inspiration to everyone around the world,” said Sienna Brunetti, 13, a seventh-grader at Garden City Middle School whose essay was one of the four winners. “She broke a barrier with gender and that has helped our world today.”

Brunetti said she wants to work at NASA when she is older.

“I’d want to help the next mission to space, specifically to Mars,” Brunetti said.