Filmmaker celebrates bravery in documentary about Sally Ride, the first American woman in space

Sally Ride blasted into fame when it was announced she’d be the first American woman in space. But the fame came at a cost.

Ride was an extremely private person and felt the need to hide her relationship with her female life partner from the world. 

A new documentary explores her life and her struggle to keep her personal life hidden.

“Sally” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and had its Texas premiere at South by Southwest. On June 16, it’ll be on National Geographic. On June 17, it’ll be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu. 

Cristina Costantini wrote and directed the documentary and spoke with Texas Standard about themes of bravery within the film and the process of telling Ride’s story. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Well, I imagine the answer is yes, but did you grow up with stories of Sally Ride? 

Cristina Costantini: Absolutely. Sally was my hero as a kid, which is part of where this film came from.

Seeing a woman in a jumpsuit going into space as a young woman, that was just symbolically so cool. And I thought, “if Sally can go to space… I’m a girl, maybe I can do big important things, too.” And I think that was the beginning of my obsession with Sally Ride. 

And as I got older, and I learned more about Sally, I just became more obsessed. And then when she died in 2012, I learned with the rest of the country that she was survived by her female life partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy.

And that made me think, oh my God, if it was that hard to be a woman at the time and be an astronaut, imagine having this love story that you were keeping secret. And what would have that been like? So that kind of started me on my journey into making this film, was that curiosity.

Well, let me ask you about that because Sally did want to keep this so secret. So what made you want to do the opposite and make a whole story about this thing that she spent her whole life really hiding? 

The turning point for me was meeting Tam O’Shaughnessy, was meeting her life partner. And Tam wanted to tell the story and celebrate their amazing life together and their love story in a way that it couldn’t have been celebrated at the time. 

Tam is the main narrator of her story and this romance is from her perspective. And I wanted to show that many of our heroes throughout history are not the people who we thought they were because of the time periods that they came up in.

And Sally is an amazing American hero, but this story is really for anyone who’s ever had to hide part of themselves to get where they want to go and to follow their dreams. Sally, I think, embodies that struggle herself. 

You mentioned Tam O’Shaughnessy, Sally’s life partner, always wanted to be more out than Sally did. Do you think that this was a cathartic process for, her making this documentary?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was not easy, I think, to be this vulnerable and to tell these details because she has a full life of training to keep them in. And so I’m so honored that she shared them with me and she was as vulnerable as she was. And I think she’s truly what makes the film work. 

Often after people die, we want to say they were perfect in every way. But Tam is brave enough to say, no, Sally had flaws and Sally was complex. And there were things that were amazing and celebrated in public about Sally, but there were also things that were not amazing. 

And her need to keep things secret was much greater than Tam’s at the time. And yet Tam was out and proud until she met Sally. And Sally kind of put her, forced her back into the closet in some ways. And I really admire Tam’s bravery in telling this story with the honesty that she does. 

I think sadly it’s more relevant than it’s ever been, the story of somebody hiding part of themselves to get where they want to go.

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Sally Ride was the first female astronaut in space. I think she spent six days in space with that first mission and then the rest of her life, especially the years immediately afterwards, she spent in the spotlight because of that.

From what you learned about her, do you think that she thought that was a fair trade-off? 

You know, the interesting thing about Sally is she was so excited to get into space and so excited about astrophysics and space and launching in a shuttle that a lot of people who I’ve talked to said they don’t think she really thought through what it meant to live as a public figure for the rest of her life because she was a highly – and this is part a big part of her story – she was a highly introverted person. 

She never discussed her sexuality with mother. She didn’t wanna discuss it with her sister who was married to a woman at the time. And so she didn’t like talking about emotions very much.

So for somebody like that to be recognized by everybody in the world at the time… She was the most famous person in the world in 1983. And so people would come up to her and they would be crying and telling her what she meant to them. And she just had this inability to process all of that emotion all at once. 

It makes her a very interesting person to follow. Someone who doesn’t wanna share their emotions or be in public, but whose love for space and love for science thrusts them into the spotlight. It was a fascinating story to be able to tell.

Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, smiles aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger during the STS-7 mission in June 1983.

I have to ask, you and I both work in media. We ask questions and tell stories. And as you mentioned, part of your story here seems to be that the media was overly focused on Sally and her position as a female astronaut.

What were you thinking listening back to some of her interviews? 

Oh my gosh, they’re crazy. They do show you how far we’ve come. I will say that.

I mean there is an obsession with talking about her anatomy and her, you know, is she going to have to wear a bra in space? Will she be serving the men coffee? Will she cry if something hard happens? 

And one of my favorite scenes in the film is just the press conference that she had to endure before going up because at the beginning of the press conference, she thinks she’s gonna get a lot of questions about science and her training, and you can tell she keeps trying to redirect the conversation back to what a good astronaut she is, or discuss the flight mission itself. But all anybody else wants to talk about is her reproductive organs, and yeah, if she’s going to cry. 

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What else do you want audiences to take away from your documentary? 

I think the film is, at a certain level, about bravery and about different kinds of bravery. Sally was brave enough to launch into space, which I think as a kid was so striking to me.

But as an adult, I’m really more moved by Tam’s kind of bravery, which is to live authentically as the person you are, even if it’s not popular at the time. And even if the rest of society says you shouldn’t. I think it’s a more relevant story than ever. 

There’s this very, very sexist, formerly sexist astronaut in the film, Mike Mullane, who apologizes for how he thought about Sally at the time. [He] thought she was taking up a man’s space in the program and [she] had no business being there. And he has a change of heart working with women and working with Sally in particular and writes this beautiful apology letter. 

So I think, especially in this era of like whoever can scream louder is right, I think having that kind of introspection and saying, “you know what, I was wrong, I was mistaken, I made a mistake and I wanna apologize,” I feel like there’s an immense amount of bravery in that. And that’s an energy that we should be celebrating now – in 2025 especially. 

Note: This story has been updated to reflect that the film will be available for streaming a day after its National Geographic premiere. We’ve also corrected an error in the spelling of the filmmaker’s name.

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