Starting in the 1960s, with the rise of women’s rights and civil rights movements, women slowly entered professional fields to which they had previously been denied access. Space, both as a field of research and a workplace, was no exception. When NASA selected the first six US-American female astronauts, they faced a variety of attitudes. This talk explores how Sally Ride (1951–2012), the first female US-American spacefarer, dealt with the perceived contradiction between being female and being an astronaut in narrative situations. By separating her work into a public and a professional sphere and locating the problem within the public sphere, she emphasized that women’s abilities were not the problem, but rather society’s outdated perceptions. Thus, Ride represented a professional image of astronauts that operated, unlike before, without the notion of gender.