The story that comes to mind when most people think of Sally Ride isn’t itself inaccurate. In 1983, Ride made history aboard the STS-7 mission as the first American woman sent into space, paving the way for the countless female astronauts and scientists who followed in her footsteps. But there’s a lesser-known aspect of her story, one that she intentionally hid from the media throughout her career. Ride was a gay woman—a fact that didn’t become public knowledge until after her death, when her partner of twenty-seven years, Tam O’Shaughnessy, wrote about their relationship in Ride’s obituary.
Fifteen years later, the new National Geographic documentary Sally sets out to tell the ever-relevant story of a pioneering figure unable to share her full self with the world. Directed by Cristina Costantini (Science Fair), the tightly-paced documentary anchors viewers in the perspective of those closest to Ride, including her family members and O’Shaughnessy, before branching out to the astronauts with whom she trained for five years leading up to STS-7.
In tracing Ride’s life from her early days as a quiet child to her achievements at Stanford University and competitive edge at NASA, Costantini illustrates the incredible scrutiny Ride faced as a trailblazing woman against whom any one mistake could be used to discredit female astronauts as a group.
Rather than offer a clear-cut hypothesis as to why Ride kept her sexuality a secret even from those closest to her, the film opts to let some of the big, unknowable questions about Ride’s life remain unanswered, while drawing a compelling throughline from her relationship with O’Shaughnessy to both the Space Race and the women’s rights movement.
Through archival and press conference footage, filmed re-enactments and interviews taken from Ride’s career, Costantini reveals new layers to Ride’s personal life that she never felt comfortable, or able, to share. And while the film’s narrative techniques are mostly par for the course of contemporary documentaries, a few key moments stand out as particularly evocative. When Costantini asks a woman named Carol Joyce why she believes Ride was such a quiet child near the beginning of the film, Joyce replies, sternly, “It’s none of your business.” Only then does the interviewer ask Joyce to introduce herself to the audience—she is Ride’s mother.
The extra pause invites viewers to contemplate Ride’s and Joyce’s relationship, which perhaps offers some insight as to why Ride was so private throughout her entire life. But looking back at Ride’s upbringing only seems to bring up more unanswerable questions. When Joyce is asked why she has difficulty expressing and understanding her emotions as a mother, she says to the camera: “If I knew how I felt about feelings, I would probably not tell you.”
After Ride was selected to go into space in 1983, the media took a concentrated interest in her over her male colleagues—and Ride clearly understood the level of scrutiny she was up against from the very beginning. Costantini curates engaging clips from various interviews that Ride conducted for major news outlets throughout this period. The clips largely speak for themselves, with Ride being asked invasive questions, including some insinuating that she would get pregnant in space—in one such incident, a male reporter asked: “Sally, has it taken a little bit getting used to the idea of traveling in such tight quarters with four men?”
“The only bad moments in our training involved the press,” Ride confesses in archived audio from a later interview. Her treatment in the media, Costantini shows, belonged to a larger cultural backlash against high-achieving women in male-dominant fields: The same types of misogynist questions directed at Ride were also pushed on pioneering female athletes of the era, including Ride’s long-time friend Billie Jean King, who appears in the film.
But when Ride makes her first odyssey into space, Costantini lets snippets from Ride’s recorded interviews play over various flickering images and footage from above the Earth, depicting the history-defining moment with a striking sense of intimacy. “It’s a totally different perspective,” she says, “and it makes you appreciate how fragile our existence is.”
While the film later loses its sense of timeline in its recounting of the events leading up to Ride’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis and the end of her life, Costantini paints an emphatic portrait of Ride’s struggles, along with moments of joy. While Ride was sadly never able to tell her full side of the story, the film offers a real sense of closure for O’Shaughnessy. “The world made it tricky and painful,” she reflects at the film’s conclusion, “but we were brave enough to love each other.”