"Different astronauts sleep in different ways"
About this Quote
The intent is practical on the surface. Sleeping in space is awkward, personal, and full of workarounds: restraints, bags, routines, preferences about light and noise. Ride’s phrasing is almost stubbornly plain, which is exactly why it works. It punctures the assumption that there’s one correct way to inhabit an extreme environment, one standardized human response that NASA can engineer into everyone. The subtext is a gentle argument for individuality inside institutions that prize uniformity. “Different” is doing all the heavy lifting: difference isn’t a problem to be eliminated, it’s a fact to be accommodated.
Context matters, too. Ride lived under an extra layer of scrutiny as the first American woman in space, where questions often drifted toward the domestic and the bodily. By answering with a matter-of-fact shrug, she reclaims the frame: yes, bodies exist; no, that doesn’t make the work less rigorous. The line functions as both normalization and deflation, a reminder that the frontier is not just technological - it’s also psychological, intimate, and stubbornly ordinary.
Quote Details
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Ride, Sally. (2026, January 18). Different astronauts sleep in different ways. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/different-astronauts-sleep-in-different-ways-20655/
Chicago Style
Ride, Sally. "Different astronauts sleep in different ways." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/different-astronauts-sleep-in-different-ways-20655/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Different astronauts sleep in different ways." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/different-astronauts-sleep-in-different-ways-20655/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.








