{"id":186077,"date":"2025-06-15T10:05:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T10:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/186077\/"},"modified":"2025-06-15T10:05:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T10:05:09","slug":"people-didnt-like-women-in-space-how-sally-ride-made-history-and-paid-the-price-documentary-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/186077\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018People didn\u2019t like women in space\u2019: how Sally Ride made history and paid the price | Documentary films"},"content":{"rendered":"

A week before Sally \u2013 a documentary about the first American woman to fly into space \u2013 landed at the Sundance film festival in January, Nasa employees received emails<\/a> informing them how Donald Trump\u2019s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rollbacks would take effect.<\/p>\n

Contracts and offices associated with DEI programs were to be terminated. Staff were given Orwellian instruction to inform the government of any attempt to disguise inclusion efforts in \u201ccoded or imprecise language\u201d. In the weeks to follow, Nasa would take back its promise<\/a> to send the first woman and person of color to the moon\u2019s surface. Meanwhile, employees are reported to be hiding their rainbow flags and any other expressions of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, allegedly because they were instructed to do so though Nasa denies those claims.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pride flag flew in space a couple years ago,\u201d says Cristina Costantini, the director of Sally, on a Zoom call with the Guardian. \u201cNow all Nasa<\/a> employees are being asked to take down any representations of pride.\u201d<\/p>\n

Costantini calls the developments sad, especially because such harmful silencing contributes to the very atmosphere that made her film\u2019s subject hide her own queer identity throughout her celebrated career. Sally Ride, who made history when she rode the space shuttle Challenger into the stars on 18 June 1983, was a lesbian. The public, and so many who knew Ride personally, only found out that part of her legacy after she died of cancer in 2012. Ride\u2019s obituary<\/a> identified Tam O\u2019Shaughnessy as her partner of 27 years.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Shaughnessy is a key voice in Sally, a National Geographic documentary revisiting everything we thought we knew about Ride \u2013 from her astronomic accomplishments to the infuriating sexism she confronted at Nasa and in the media, with reporters questioning how she would dress, whether space travel would affect her ovaries and if she would buckle and cry in the face of daunting challenges. But now there\u2019s the extra dimension, the part of Ride kept tragically buried because of the institutionalized homophobia we see resurfacing today. \u201cWe made this movie not thinking it was particularly controversial,\u201d says Costantini. \u201cWe had no idea it would be this relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Costantini is speaking from her Los Angeles office in Atwater Village, a photo of a space shuttle and another of Ride on the Challenger mission hovering just behind her. The investigative reporter turned film-maker \u2013 who grew up wanting to be a scientist and made her feature debut co-directing the Sundance audience award winner Science Fair<\/a> \u2013 describes Ride as a major influence on her life. She remembers researching the astronaut as a young child on an old Encarta Encyclopedia CD-Rom for a book report. In grade three, Costantini contributed to a class mural where the students in her Milwaukee school painted their heroes on a wall. Ride is drawn standing alongside Brett Favre and Michael Jordan \u2013 a small sampling of the heroes that fed childhood aspirations in the mid-90s, says Costantini.<\/p>\n

With Sally, Costantini is returning to her icon\u2019s story with a canvas bigger than either a book report or mural, but an even more challenging story to tell.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe film is really two stories interwoven,\u201d says Costantini. \u201cIt\u2019s the public and the private Sally. The public Sally is so well-documented that it\u2019s a problem. We had to bring in 5,000 reels from the Nasa archive and sort through and sound sync all of them. That was a monumental task.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then the other task is the private story, maybe the more interesting story, which has no documentation at all. There are only five really good pictures of [Sally and her partner, Tam] together that we had. You can\u2019t build a love story out of showing people the same five pictures over and over again. For that we had to kind of invent our own cinematic romantic language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Costantini\u2019s doc pairs narrations from O\u2019Shaughnessy and others who were close to Ride with animation and 16mm visuals. They express the love, the excitement of first relationships, the heavy toll from keeping these feelings secret and the sting when Ride \u2013 whose noted emotional reserve is making more and more sense \u2013 would behave inexplicably.<\/p>\n

\u201cSally is a very confusing central subject in some ways,\u201d says Costantini, remarking on how Ride didn\u2019t always make for a picture-perfect feminist hero, the uneasiness going a long way to make her even more compelling. The director refers to a story recounted by fellow astronaut Kathryn Sullivan. During the race to become the first American woman to go to space, Ride sabotaged a Nasa exercise Sullivan was working on. Talking heads mull whether that was an example of Ride\u2019s prankster sense of humour, or a cutthroat competitive nature that flew in the face of female solidarity and sisterhood. \u201cShe didn\u2019t leave tell all diaries or an audio journal of how she was feeling in every single moment. So we\u2019re left to interpret later on what her choices were, and why she did what she did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tam O\u2019Shaughnessy and Sally Ride in Sydney, Australia, in 2004. Photograph: Photo courtesy of Tam O\u2019Shaughnessy<\/p>\n

Costantini also points to Ride\u2019s five-year marriage to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley. The union in retrospect can be seen as a betrayal of who she was, and the LGTBQ+ movement that she never publicly aligned with. But it was also a necessary and sacrificial career move to make her dream possible, deflecting any suspicions about sexual orientation while making Ride a more ideal candidate to make history and inspire young women. \u201cPeople didn\u2019t like women in space,\u201d says Costantini. \u201cAnd they especially didn\u2019t like single women in space. Some of the male astronauts were, like: \u2018Well, it was a good look for her not to be single and in space.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

When Ride does climb above the atmosphere on her historic mission, there\u2019s a cathartic moment where the tense conflicts within her \u2013 or put upon her \u2013 are either resolved or abandoned, if only temporarily.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved being weightless,\u201d says Ride, while in space, her recorded words packing new mean considering all the burdens we now understand. \u201cIt\u2019s a feeling of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe escaped Earth\u2019s orbit \u2013 Earth\u2019s gravity \u2013 metaphorically too,\u201d says Costantini, on that pivotal moment in American history and Ride\u2019s personal life. \u201cLooking at the Earth from space, she started to, for the first time, really think about the imaginary lines that we have. She was struck by the fact that all these countries have known borders around them. These are human constructions. As Tam says in the film, the lines between genders, the lines between race, the lines between countries, who we\u2019re allowed to love, those are meaningless constructs.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpace was transformative for her. When she came back to Earth, she finally allowed herself to be who she really is, and love who she really loved.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A week before Sally \u2013 a documentary about the first American woman to fly into space \u2013 landed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-186077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114686821992847288","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}