SAN DIEGO — With the Artemis I mission to the moon on the horizon, documentary filmmaker Steven Barber is looking to build a tribute to legendary astronaut Sally Ride, at the San Diego Air & Space Museum.
Barber recently produced and organized a tribute statue to Ride on the east coast that was unveiled in June at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in New York. He coordinated the project with Lundeen Sculpture of Colorado and artist Joey Bainer.
“Now, I’m going to build her at the Air & Space Museum in San Diego,” said Barber. “She’ll be a little different for this part of the world. Here I’m going to paint her in her blue space suit she went on the shuttle with.”
When finished, it will stand 7-feet-tall on a 5-foot pedestal and will weigh around 450 pounds, commemorating Ride, not only for being the first American woman in space in 1983, but also being the youngest American astronaut to have flown in space at the age of 32.
“She got picked out of 8,000 people and that could’ve been it,” said Barber. “But she went up twice and then when the Challenger blew up, she became the lead investigator on the Challenger. She was a brilliant physicist.”
After leaving NASA in 1987, she was a professor of physics at University of California San Diego while living in La Jolla.
Sally Ride Science is a program through UCSD that carries on her legacy, having educated thousands of students over the last twenty years, offering workshops to grades 3-12.
“She left an indelible mark on the space program, on science, it’s an inspiration,” said Barber. “She wasn’t just an astronaut. She was very proud of being a physicist. It was really what she wanted to be known for. She was really a brilliant physicist.”
Ride was honored with her own coin last year from the U.S. Mint, the ‘Sally Ride Quarter.’ Barber, who also coordinated a monument to Apollo 11 that is on display at the Kennedy Space Center as well as a monument to Apollo 13 at the Johnson Space Center, can’t wait to get started on Sally Ride’s new tribute here in San Diego.
“What Sally wanted everyone to know is that anything and everything is possible, that failure was not an option,” said Barber. “You can do anything you want if you get up every morning, you swing the bat, you overcome, you improvise, you adapt. You’ll certainly have success.”
Barber hopes to unveil the statue at the San Diego Air & Space Museum next June for the 40th anniversary of Ride’s first space flight aboard the shuttle Challenger.
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