While she was still engaged on the publicity tour, Abbey assigned Ride to the crew of STS-41-G. This was on Crippen's request; he had been assigned to another mission, STS-41-C, that would fly beforehand as part of a test to see how quickly crews could be turned around, and wanted Ride as his flight engineer again so that she could sit in for him during crew training for STS-41-G in the meantime. During mission simulations, she sat in the commander's left hand seat. Ride would become the first American woman to fly twice, and her TFNG crewmate Kathryn Sullivan would become the first American woman to perform an extravehicular activity (EVA); Savitskaya had already become the first woman to do both when she flew in space on Soyuz T-12 in July 1984. However, it would be the first time that two women were in space together.