She will soon be an astronaut. Kristen Stewart will star in “The Challenger”, a biopic series dedicated to Sally Ride. If in France her name speaks little, she is considered a true pioneer across the Atlantic. Indeed, the main person involved is none other than the first American woman to have traveled into space, in the 1980s. “She has never done television, but when she read the story of Sally Ride, she became obsessed with telling it from her own point of view,” said Kyra Sedgwick, the show’s producer.
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“She was so compelling and so enraged at the idea of telling the story of an American heroine who had to hide who she was, at that time,” she added, referring to the secret relationship that spoke to Sally Ride with author Tam O’Shaughnessy.
Inspired by the book “The New Guys” by Meredith Bagby, “The Challenger” is co-produced by Amblin Partners and Nevermind, the respective production companies of Steven Spielberg and Kristen Stewart.
She marked the history of space conquest
Sally Ride was born in May 1951, in Los Angeles. After brilliant scientific and sports studies – she was also an excellent tennis player – at Stanford University, she joined the ranks of NASA in 1978. The space center was indeed recruiting young candidates and, for the first time, women. Out of the eight thousand applications, she is one of the six women selected. After five years of training, she was chosen to join the crew of the second mission of the space shuttle Challenger. We are in 1983, she is 32 years old, and succeeds Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaïa, two Soviets.
Her status as the first woman to travel into space earned her media attention. NASA is even going so far as to develop a makeup kit so that it can use it in space, as if it were a necessity. She won’t take it with her on board. “Everyone wanted to know what kind of makeup I took with me – they made fun of how I prepared to use the robotic arm or deploy communications satellites,” Sally Ride told Gloria Steinem in a 1983 interview.
On June 18, 1983, when the space shuttle took off, Sally Ride became the first American to fly to the stars. Thus marking history.
In 1989, after two other successful missions, the astronaut hung up her suit before becoming a professor of physics at the University of California in San Diego, then the director of its Space Institute. A few years later, she founded Sally Ride Science, a company created to encourage young girls to pursue science studies.
In March 2011, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. But despite treatments and an operation, Sally Ride died on July 23, 2012 at the age of 61. Just before her death, the physicist took care to write her obituary. It was there that for the first time his relationship with the writer Tam O’Shaughnessy, lasting 27 years, was made public. All her life, Sally Ride had chosen to keep her private life a secret.
