Sally Ride doesn't look like a woman outrageous enough to sit on top of a stack of enormous flaming rockets. There's absolutely nothing about her refined appearance or manner to suggest she has the grit to travel into the great, dark, airless abyss strapped to the seat of a hurtling piece of machinery. She's small, reserved, a reluctant heroine uneasy with eminence, a self-possessed but distant star who navigates her rarefied universe with quiet control.

Ask her about propulsion or the effect of clouds on radiative energy, and she's forthright, focused, even friendly. Ask about the psychological and spiritual impact of space travel, and she shuts down. There are astronauts who've returned to Earth with epiphanies about universal connectedness and the meaning of existence. Sally Ride is not one of them. "The experience of being in space didn't change my perspective of myself or of the planet or of life," she declares. "I had no spiritual experience."

Ride was the first American woman in space, a kickoff to a series of firsts for women, including last month's flight of Air Force Col. Eileen Collins, the first woman to command an American space flight, the shuttle Columbia.

But Dr. Sally Kristen Ride does not relish the first-woman-in space mantle. On June 18, 1983, when she climbed into the flight engineer's seat of Challenger, she was a sensation: brilliant, pretty, girlish and brave. "Ride, Sally Ride!" a global fan club wildly cheered. Six days later she returned to glory on Earth. She endured a media sentence, allowing her NASA handlers to plant her on lecterns like a potted palm. Still she managed to orbit the national consciousness relatively unknown. She was pleasant, yet guarded. She made it clear that she wore the ID of scientist/astronaut, not the badge of a feminist space jockette or symbol of women's progress.

Sixteen years later she still wears the same ID. And she continues to collect achievements. She is a professor at UC San Diego, a scientist, a two-time National Spaceflight Medal winner. Her most recent accomplishment is the creation of a national program designed to attract millions of young students to science. Her greatest hope is that EarthKAM will do nothing short of revolutionizing science education in America. But please don't expect her to gush about the thrill of reaching for the stars.

"Talking is contrary to her personality," says her ex-husband, friend and e-mail pal, veteran astronaut Steven Hawley, a crew member on the latest Columbia mission. "She's more from Mars than from Venus."