She was a California teenage tennis champion who considering turning professional after being told by Billie Jean King that she was good enough. In fact, the day after staying up late to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, she won her first round match at a national junior tennis tournament.

She started college at Swarthmore, then transferred to Stanford where she earned two bachelor’s degrees: English (because Shakespeare intrigued her), and physics, because lasers fascinated her even more.  She went on to earn her Ph.D. in astrophysics at Stanford and would go on to become the first American woman in space in 1983, and the third woman in space overall. Her name was Sally Ride, and she remains the youngest American astronaut to have ever traveled to space (she was 32).

Sally Ride was an exceedingly private person, but prior to her landmark achievement,  a magazine interview revealed that she had good-humored mother who allowed Sally and her sister to buy a Rough Collie only after carpeting the house in Collie colors to make the dog’s shedding less obvious and reduce her vacuuming effort. They’d been inspired to get a dog after seeing a Labrador Retriever catch snowballs in the former Yugoslavia, a dog named “Tsigo,” Sally’s father wanted to name their new Collie, “Lassie,” but Sally nixed the idea.. The sisters agreed to name their new dog, “Tsigane,” the feminine form of Tsigo. The sisters were smitten with their new dog, playing, wrestling, and sleeping with her.  As an adult, Sally even used “Tsigane” as her email address and password, often dropping the “e.”

Her mother, Joyce Ride, would later say, “Dale and I raised Sally with a lot of help from our Collie, “Tsigane” [ed.note:”gypsy” in Hungarian].  The kids were her sheep, and nobody had better raise a hand to them. I tried once, when I was really angry. Tsigane gently took my wrist and said, “We don’t do that.”

Sally Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Photo of the Ride sisters with Tsigane