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Story highlights. 1  Sally Ride earned four degrees from Stanford University; she was an author. 2  President Barack Obama hails Ride as a national hero. 3  The former astronaut dies after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer; she was 61. 4  NASA: Ride broke barriers ... and literally changed the face of America's space program.
She was 61. The cause was pancreatic cancer, her company, Sally Ride Science, announced on its Web site. Dr. Ride, a physicist who was accepted into the space program in 1978 after she answered a newspaper ad for astronauts, flew on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984.