Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, died Monday (July 23) at the age of 61, Space.com reports. Ride made history when she launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission in 1983. She became only the third woman to ever travel in space, after Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Ride traveled into space once more in 1984, as a member of the STS-41G crew on the space shuttle Challenger. Over the course of her career, Ride logged a total of 343 hours in space. Sally Ride’s death [1] came after 17 months of battling pancreatic cancer. Here are some tributes to Sally Ride from astronauts, scientists, historians, industry officials and other luminaries…