Sally Ride joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American woman to enter into low Earth orbit in 1983. She died Monday after a 17- month battle with pancreatic cancer. Ride, along with Amelia Earhart and many others, are pioneers who inspired generations of women. And this what Ruth Spencer’s article on The Guardian is about. The author writes: Female pioneers like Earhart and Ride have a powerful hold on our imaginations. They’re icons of courage and perseverance. They’re role models for young people, especially women. Earhart and Ride are part of a tradition of women who discovered parts of the world that no man (or woman) had gone before, including Alison Hargreaves, who climbed Everest without oxygen (and several other mountains while heavily pregnant); Helen Thayer, who lived for a year with a wolf pack in the Arctic Circle; and Nellie Bly, who took a record-breaking trip around the world 72 days and wrote a ground breaking exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from the inside. If many women did great things, Spencer underlines: ‘As they say, history was written by a man, and the accomplishments of many women are often looked over.‘……

It has been a month since I left the Earth. I already shared with you some of my new experiences up there but if I can see wonderful things, I also realize the changes on our planet due to the ice melting, will have consequences. But not only catastrophic ones it seems. I just read an article on CNN by Bob Reiss, a former reporter at the Chicago Tribune, who just published “The Eskimo and the Oil Man“: What happens in the Arctic as ice melts there could soon cheapen the cost of the gas you buy and products you purchase from Asia. It could help make the nation more energy independent. It could draw our leaders into a conflict over undersea territory. It is already challenging Washington to protect millions of square miles filled with some of the most magnificent wildlife on Earth, and native people whose culture and way of life is at risk as a squall line of development sweeps across the once inaccessible top of the planet. So it could be great, but it could also go terribly wrong: The Russian military has identified the Arctic as one of the likely places for conflict to erupt in…