The Viking girl who flew to space

After she ran out of space for her childhood dream

If you look up to the sky, what do you see?

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Hi, everyone-

I’ve seen shapes in the clouds when I was a kid. But I know I’ve definitely never seen a ‘tree’ in the sky. And yet, back in the Bronze Age along northern Eurasia—in Viking territories—there was a concept of a tree, Yggdrasil, that connects all the worlds in its branches.

Researchers have long thought that the inspiration behind this mythological tree is the motionless, ever-constant Pole Star—Polaris. When you look up to the sky at night and find Polaris, it looks as though everything revolves around it. And perhaps, the idea of a central tree that doesn’t change, grew from this.

And so when someone had gone into after-life, it was said that the Vikings would plant a Warden tree on top of their burial mound. 

Turns out, Polaris looks very close to the spot in the sky where Earth’s axis of rotation points. [Data: NASA]

Last week, I talked about why certain things are harder to see on the phone. This week, I’m covering sight, Nordic mythologies, and space—which are three things I never thought I’d ever needed to piece together in one sentence.

But as I’m typing this to you, there is one Norse-Viking girl who made me feel like I should. You know her as Sally Ride—the first ever American woman who flew to space. 

And made it back.

The thing that really struck me about Sally wasn’t that she was a woman, which of course was unheard of at the time. 

It was that she could see things that no one else could.

Here’s what I mean.

Sally’s mother, Joyce, a Nordic American, worked as a volunteer counselor at a women’s correctional facility—a prison. Sally didn’t show much interest in what her mother was doing. She had other interests. Unusual ones. She was smart, alright. But just to give us an idea of what she’s about: in college, she took both a Shakespeare class and Quantum Mechanics.

I’ve been around a lot of great people smarter than me—but I’ve never heard of anyone who scored A’s in two such polar opposites. 

But Sally did. 

She loved Shakespeare. And she’s not afraid of thinking about time travel. Add to that: she was an ace tennis player who served up a match so good against Billie Jean King, that King suggested she should ditch college and become a pro player. When she was 14, she finished second in a Californian tennis tournament. She was in the top 20s in the junior nationals.

So yes, she was pretty good! It was her dream to become a pro.

So when King praised her, she could’ve taken that as a sign to go all in. Instead, one morning, as she cheerfully ate her scrambled egg in the cafeteria and opened a student newspaper—Sally Ride jumped ship. She saw that for the first time, women could apply to NASA. Billie Jean King’s praise, Shakespeare, and many years of childhood dreams for a life of tennis glory—all suddenly gone. 

That’s decades of hard work, passion, and diverse interests—whittled down into one moment over scrambled eggs and orange juice. In a loud school cafeteria. After nothing more than just a couple of sentences on a school paper. 

It’s easy to see now that she made the right decision. 

• But how did she know then that she wasn’t going to be a tennis all-time great?

• How was she supposed to know that she wasn’t going to revolutionize theater and become history’s modern Shakespeare?

• How was she supposed to know that her Viking blood wasn’t meant to follow in her mother’s footsteps and be both brain and muscle for those behind the bars?

She didn’t.

But she seemed to see two things that few could:

Thing 1: The ability to freely choose which branch of the tree belonged to her at any given time. 

Thing 2: The understanding that, in all likelihood, everything is already connected anyway. And that her varied interests in tennis, Shakespeare, and science—weren’t as separate as people think.

She sees that, if anything, she is the constant. 

Call it what you might, but I believe that her scramble-egg moment was when Sally Ride, probably barely aware that she had it in her, became the Viking you’d hear in mythologies. She saw that she can be the one to pick up an instrument of choice—and start swinging it on her tree.

Or in this case: on her space shuttle.

When I was thumbing through archival research materials, I couldn’t help but notice that the insides of the Apollo shuttle might as well be a high-tech tree bark. [Data: NASA History office]

Of Sally and her minister sister, Bear, her mother, Joyce, would joke: “We’ll see who gets to heaven first.”

Something about Sally, Bear, and Joyce, made me feel like they could be one of the same—one tree with different branches:

Somewhat different, but always a Warden space Viking that points to the stars.   

-Thalia

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PS:

If you enjoyed what you’re reading, consider becoming a free, or preferably paid subscriber. Thanks for contributing. Every time someone becomes a subscriber, especially a paying subscriber, for me it can feel very much like what Sally must’ve felt when reading that cafeteria paper: the sight to keep going.

-Thalia