At one point, Sally Ride was arguably the most famous woman in the world. She flew two missions for NASA, including the one that made her the first American woman in space. She gave hundreds of interviews, and has appeared in countless books, on commemorative stamps, even on Sesame Street. She has a Barbie doll in her likeness. But when it came to her personal life, she was close-lipped. It was only with the publication of her obituary that the world learned she had a decades-long romantic relationship with another woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy. Ride passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2012, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed gay marriage as a national right.
But a new documentary, Sally, directed by Cristina Costantini, makes clear that legal distinctions weren’t solely — or perhaps even mostly — to blame for Ride’s reticence. Narrated largely by her partner, O’Shaughnessy, the film explores Ride’s career, for the first time filling in at least some missing pieces of the woman who was so remarkably well-known, yet also so dedicated to keeping herself to herself, even from her family and closest friends.
Sally premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year, winning the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize. It will be available to the general public on June 16 on National Geographic and begins streaming on Disney+ and Hulu June 17. You can watch the trailer here.
Astronomy was able to catch up with O’Shaughnessy and Costantini before the film’s wide release. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
KH: One of the biggest themes in this film is just how intensely private Sally was about her life. Some of that was obviously for professional reasons, but the film indicates that a lot of it seemed to be intrinsic to her personality and upbringing. How hard is it to tell a story about a woman who was so averse to sharing herself, not only with the public, but even with her inner circle?
Tam: Sally was a conundrum. And Cristina would agree with me. Because on one hand, she was totally open and she was a very honest person. And by open, I mean that we invited each other to all of our university events. She came with me; I went with her. So she was never worried about what people thought. She didn’t think that way. But she just wouldn’t say the words, “Come meet my partner.” She just couldn’t do it.
And her parents, especially her mother, and Bear, her sister, are as progressive and easygoing as can be, and Bear is gay. But it was just unbelievable [that she couldn’t say it out loud].
But I think Cristina can tell better how difficult it was to try to make a film where you just don’t have very much intimate or personal information from the person that you’re trying to tell the story about.
Cristina: Yeah. When someone comes to see a documentary, they want to see their central subject. They want to have them bare all and explain exactly why they did exactly what they did. And I just don’t think Sally ever would be able to give that or did give that.
I think the same thing that made Sally such a great astronaut — this ability to compartmentalize and move along with the things that she didn’t want to think about — probably made her tough to be in a relationship with. And it also probably means she’ll remain a conundrum in some ways till the end of time. Or she was just Sally, and I think what Bear says at the end [of the film] really captures it: “We can let Sally be Sally.”
She’s a complicated person — like the rest of us — and I don’t think the public will ever get exactly what they want from her, to explain all of what she was thinking. That’s never going to happen.
And I think the great thing about a documentary is you can kind of say that. I think in the narrative version of this script people would assign meaning to every single thing that she did. But I don’t know if we’ll ever know [why she made some choices]. I don’t know if Sally knew some of these answers.
I never got to meet her. But it’s been such a great privilege in my life to hang out with all the people she hung out with because they’re all so cool. I mean, [Lauren Cioffi], who produced this film, and I say all the time, “Thank God Sally surrounded herself with such cool people.” Because it meant the last few years of our lives have been such a joy to be immersed with her friends and her family.
And I will say, in our attempts to explain why Sally was the way she is, we did that interview with Joyce Ride [Sally’s mother]. And at first when we finished the interview, we were like, “Well, we got nothing.” We got nothing that’s usable. But it turns out that actually showing how closed off Joyce is is a window into why Sally was the way she is.
KH: It really is a great moment. She sits down for an interview, gets all mic’d up, just to tell you that basic questions about her daughter are none of your business. For something that literally says nothing, it does seem to explain a lot about Sally.
Tam: Bear also says — and I don’t think she says it in the film — but the way Bear describes Sally, is that in a way she was a very simple person. She was complex but she was also very simple. She had her passions: sports and physics and science education, and she basically had the same friends her whole life. She was a very straightforward person.
KH: Tam, the world changed so rapidly, especially right around the time Sally passed away, in terms of how acceptable it was to be publicly queer. If she were still alive today, do you think she would be open to coming out like this? Is it a difference in how willing you are to talk about these topics compared to her, or do you think Sally would have gotten here too, given how different things are today?
Tam: Good question. I think the first thing to remember is that our community has been fighting for decades and decades and probably longer than that for human rights, for the right to be who we are. Sally got sick in 2011 and “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was still the law of the land. Marriage equality did not happen until 2015. So in a way it was just starting to accelerate.
The American public went from in the ’60s, 2% of people thought gays should have rights to 70% today, so maybe when Sally passed it was 55 or 60% or something. [A Gallup poll from 2011 states that Americans supported gay marriage 50% to 48%.] So it was moving in a good direction. And I do think it’s true that if Sally and I had stayed in academia I think it would have been easier for her to be more open.
But I also think that it was just against her basic nature. She did not talk about her feelings very often or for very long. I was much more open. I mean, as soon as I realized I was attracted to women I was actually proud of it. I told my mother, told my sisters … so we were just different people. We grew up very different. My family said “I love you” all the time, were always hugging. Joyce Ride, not so much.
So I’m not sure. I kind of have this feeling that Sally would have stayed Sally. But she probably would have been a little looser. Maybe she would have told her mom and Bear. Who knows?
KH: For me, one of the most moving moments of the film was [astronaut] Mike Mullane’s interview at the end. I really appreciated his candor earlier in the film, not knowing where it was going. Women in science and in many other industries have been looked down on by their male peers for a long time, so it was unpleasant but unsurprising to hear his views on Sally and other women in the astronaut corps early on. But hearing his turnabout, and the letter that he wrote you, Tam, was really powerful. I’m wondering how that particular interview came about.
Cristina: Oftentimes when you’re making a film about the past, nobody wants to take responsibility for being the bad guy. To say, “I was the sexist” or “I was the racist.” Or it’s very rare. So while we would talk to a lot of people who would say sexism and racism existed at the time at NASA, very few people would say, “I was the problem.”
And I think it’s incredibly brave of Mike to do that. He didn’t have to do that in the public sphere. He didn’t have to say that he was the problem and that it was real and that he knows it was real because he had those thoughts and he carried these immense biases that Sally had to fight through.
I think the film is about lots of different kinds of bravery, and Mike’s bravery is one that should be celebrated, especially now in 2025. It feels increasingly rare for people to apologize or say that they got it wrong or for people to want to improve.
He says it’s his Catholic guilt, and that he has this upbringing of repenting his whole life. But I loved Mike’s admission, and his was the only one that I can find. That’s the simple answer: Mike’s the only one we could find who would say, “Yes, I’m the problem.”
And then when we learned that he wrote that beautiful note to you, Tam, [after Ride’s death], I think that’s when we really decided we have to go get this on camera.
Because there were 35 people in that class, and Mike was the only one who would say that. And he’s just very plainspoken, a great storyteller, doesn’t shy away from things. We’re so lucky that he agreed to sit down with us. I think that’s a scene that hits a lot of people because it’s so rare to see people apologize in that way.
KH: One of the other eye-opening interview moments was with Kathryn Sullivan. She alleges that Sally tripped a circuit breaker on her during a training exercise. Sally was obviously a very driven person, so does that jibe with what you knew of her otherwise?
Cristina: I think it really depends on who you ask. Kathryn saw it as sabotage. I think Bear sees it as Sally teasing someone, but everyone that I’ve talked to sees that in a different way. I’m curious how you see that, Tam?
Tam: When I first saw it in the film, I was just kind of surprised. It didn’t sound like something that Sally would do. I really liked that Kathy gave various scenarios for what could have happened — although it did seem like she leaned towards sabotage. But I remember Sally talking about her high school days and just how mean she could be to some of her teachers. You know, if she didn’t respect a teacher, she would be rolling her eyes, making others in the class giggle and whatever.
You know, she went to NASA when she was pretty darn young, 27, and maybe she hadn’t gotten over that childish phase of hers from high school. So I don’t know. The Sally I knew when we became romantic would not take the time to do something like that, but who knows?
KH: I was really intrigued by the timeline. Sally spent many years training to be an astronaut but her two missions were ‘83 and ‘84. The Challenger disaster — which the film says was a big factor in her leaving NASA — was January of ‘86. Do you think Sally regretted how short her time was, and was Challenger her reason for leaving?
Tam: You know, I think Sally always thought that NASA was going to be short-term. She always wanted to be a physics professor at a university. You’re right that the Challenger disaster really hurt her. She could not believe that some of her friends and the leadership, the folks that she respected, who were kind of her heroes, wanted to cover up what actually happened. Or they didn’t want to accept that it was human error and that they made a fatal decision.
But the only reason Sally really wanted to go to NASA was to fly in space. Once Challenger happened, she knew it would take years to recover. They had to change the culture. So much had to happen with Congress and everything. So she just realized, “Well, I’m going to have to wait too long.” She didn’t want to work at NASA. That was never her goal. You know, her husband, Steve, and many of the women and men in her class stayed at NASA for decades and they loved it. But that was never Sally. She always wanted more freedom and to become a professor.
Cristina: She’s only really an astronaut for nine years, and I think there are probably 10 other films that could be made about Sally and other parts of her life. But she was an educator at heart. And you have to remember there wasn’t an opportunity for women to fly into space [when Sally was in school]. So this was not the kind of trajectory she had set out for herself until she read about it “while eating eggs,” as Tam would say, in the dining hall that day. So she’s a physicist that got to go to space and change history but I think she was very happy being a physicist. That was her core identity right, Tam?
Tam: That’s right, and that’s what she thought of herself: “I’m a theoretical physicist.” And she was extremely proud of it. But I think she also realized that achieving that dream of being the first American woman in space would give her a ton of opportunities to do good work that she would be interested in. And it turned out to be true.
KH: So after NASA she was a professor for a long time. And then you guys, Tam, started the educational company Sally Ride Science. How did that come about?
Tam: So it was kind of a slow progression. I’m a biology person and she was a physicist, but we loved talking about science and we also liked writing about it. So we started writing young adult science books, but we tried to make them really fun and interesting, like Isaac Asimov when he wrote his kids books.
And then we started reading and noticing so many articles in newspapers and magazines about how poorly American boys and girls do in math and science and we just couldn’t understand why that was true. So we started digging into the reasons and it’s mostly cultural. Textbooks typically have Albert Einstein, maybe they have Marie Curie but there’s a million women doing science and scientists work in teams. They don’t work by themselves in a little lab with a white coat on and a pocket protector all by themselves. The image of scientists was all wrong.
So we decided that maybe we could do something about it. And I think it’s one of those cases where being naive is a good thing. None of us — there were five founders — knew anything about business. We didn’t know how to start a company. Sally, because of her celebrity, got to meet just wonderful people that helped guide us, angel investors and people that were smart in marketing and business.
In fact, the original name of the company was Imaginary Lines. We loved it. It’s a very romantic name, you know, imaginary lines between men and women, boys and girls, countries, all that. But one of our investors said, “Sally. What are you guys doing? It takes millions and millions of dollars to build a brand. You have a brand, use it!”
So we changed the name to Sally Ride Science after two years. But next year’s our 25th anniversary so it’s pretty darn cool.
KH: Cristina, you’ve talked about being a science nerd and Sally being a hero of yours, so can you talk about how this project came together? How you came to team up with Tam to tell this story?
Cristina: Tam is going to be so sick of this! Tam’s heard this story 4,000 times, so don’t kill me!
I was looking at the pins I had from science fairs when I was back home in Milwaukee for a film festival, and I have a little blue Sally Ride Science pin. I don’t know where or how I got it, but I would have been 14 at the time.
Because I was a science fair nerd, I was a science kid, I loved science. And I thought I wanted to do that, so I studied behavioral science, and then I became interested in humans and storytelling later.
But when I was a kid, in third and fourth grade is when I was really in my Sally obsession. When I was in third grade, I remember our teacher asked us to put our heroes on the outside of the elementary school and so I painted Sally because she was my hero, but it was the ’90s in Milwaukee. So she’s next to Brett Favre and Michael Jordan. And it’s still there today.
So yeah. I did book reports on Sally, I just loved Sally. And then when she passed away in 2012 and I learned with the rest of the world that Tam existed and they had this 27-year-long romance. that’s when I really started thinking, “Wow, NASA was barely ready for women, how would this have played out at the time?”
So I started thinking about it then but it really wasn’t until a few years ago that I started pursuing it and I learned very quickly this production company called Story Syndicate had a deal with Tam. They had gone to National Geographic and National Geographic kind of made this marriage between all of us, and it’s been fantastic. We spent the last few years making the film and premiered at Sundance in January and it goes on the platform in a few days, so it’s been an incredible ride. Pun not intended.
It seemed fairly noncontroversial when we started making it and now it’s like the world, 2025, has changed. But it makes it more timely than ever. I think this film is for anyone who’s ever had to hide part of themselves to be where they want to be and that’s an experience that in 2025 is more relevant than it’s ever been. I’m proud that it’s coming out this year.
