At that time Sally was still a student. Sally soon saw a newspaper article that was looking for astronauts and she responded to it. Over 8,000 people applied to this article, but only 25 were hired and got to be an astronaut. Sally was one of six women picked. She soon went to the Johnson Space center in Houston, Texas to train so she would be ready to go to space. Sally had to become an expert in space travel and all the controls that were in the space shuttle. Sally’s training also included parachute jumping, water survival, weightlessness, radio communications, and navigation. She enjoyed flight training so much that flying became one of her hobbies. After a year long of training and evaluations, she then got to take off to outer space. She was the first American woman to travel to space. Her job was to work the robotic arm. She used the arm to help put satellites into space. During her second and third flights into space, she worked on the ground as a communications officer, relaying messages from mission control to the crew on the shuttle. She was part of the team that developed the robotic arm used by shuttle crews to deploy and retrieve