Sally Ride: The Trailblazing Astronaut Who Had to Conceal Her Sexual Orientation to Reach Space.

“Ah, by the way, Sally Ride was gay.” This was the headline of New York Magazine regarding the death of the first American astronaut on July 23, 2012. This headline aimed to emphasize the discreet and casual manner in which the world learned of both the pioneer’s death—due to pancreatic cancer—and her sexuality. A single word in a press release, carefully prepared by her and her partner, mentioned “Tam O’Shaughnessy, her companion of 27 years” in passing, making headlines that were arguably bigger in the U.S. than the news of her historic flight as the first woman in space, achieved in 1983 (two decades after Valentina Tereshkova of the USSR). National Geographic premieres a documentary tomorrow, June 17, titled (Sally, Disney+) that rediscovers her legacy and the double challenge she faced to achieve her goal: reaching space as a woman and a lesbian in such a macho and homophobic era. A documentary that, while revisiting the struggles of the pioneer, particularly calls out today’s society, as many, like Donald Trump at NASA, seek to erase all traces of diversity or empowerment of minorities in their quest for real equality.

“All kids dreamed at some point of being astronauts, but since the space program was only for men, I never even thought I could be an astronaut,” Ride begins in the film, which is constructed with recordings from her time at the space agency and current testimonies from close friends, such as her widow, Tam O’Shaughnessy.

Fortunately, in 1976 NASA opened its doors to the first class that accepted women and racial minorities, and Ride, born in Los Angeles in 1951, did not hesitate to apply. She was an astrophysicist at Stanford University and an amateur tennis player with the skills to have turned professional, just in case anyone questions her merit. At the presentation of that class of 35 candidates, only 10 received all the attention and endured the unbearable press questions: the six women, three Black men, and one of Asian descent. They bore the brunt of the scrutiny. “They didn’t want to know about our hopes for space exploration or what we wanted to do; they took the stereotypical perspective: the romantic, makeup, fashion… The perspective they usually applied when reporting on women,” recalls Kathy Sullivan, one of the candidates from that group.

“The only bad moments during training had to do with the press,” Ride recalls. It’s easy to believe this, seeing the regrettable questions posed to her and her colleagues in the late seventies and early eighties. Questions about motherhood, pregnancy, or whether she “cried” under pressure—even right before flying into space. As the documentary shows well, those women wanted to fit into the program but were also brave and successful professionals who didn’t shy away from the machismo of the time. “You shouldn’t even ask that question, scratch it,” Judith Resnik told a reporter. “You either call me Doctor Ride or Sally,” said the astronaut to another journalist who called her “Miss Ride.”

Competitive and ambitious, like anyone else aspiring to be chosen to fly into space, Ride knew what to say in front of the cameras to avoid missteps. “Are there people at NASA who don’t believe women are ready?” she was asked. “I think there are some people waiting to see how I do it; let me put it that way.”

But the pressure was immense, within facilities at the Johnson Space Center, which had 4,000 men and four women. A place named in honor of Lyndon Johnson, the man who abruptly ended the Mercury program in the sixties, aimed at training women astronauts in the early days of the space race—one won four times by the Soviets with Sputnik, Laika, Yuri Gagarin, and Tereshkova. And also with Svetlana Savitskaya, the second woman in space, in 1982.

The “male culture” of NASA was displayed in a now-legendary episode described by Ride herself in the documentary. She was the first woman to review what they called “crew equipment,” namely the space kit. They already knew what to put in the male kit, but what should go in hers? “In their infinite wisdom, the NASA engineers designed a makeup case,” said Ride bluntly: pockets for lipstick, eyeliner, and makeup remover… “Then they asked how many tampons should be taken on a week-long flight. ‘Is a hundred the right number?’ I told them no, it was not the right number.”

“Sally grabs one of those kits, a canvas case with zippers, and keeps pulling out tampons like those joke snakes that pop out of party tricks,” recalls Sullivan. “Not even the six of us together, in half a year, would have used all the tampons in there.”

When Sally’s mother was asked to comment on the historic change that allowed her daughter to be an astronaut, she exclaimed, “God bless Gloria Steinem!”, referring to the historic feminist who also attended her launch into space in 1983 as a VIP. But Ride was primarily discreet and defended her place as a woman without openly declaring herself a feminist (though she maintained a historic conversation with Steinem). Upon returning to Earth, being the most famous woman in the world, she felt anxiety and the weight of being a role model—“women cried when they saw me”—and had to seek therapy to cope.

She met Tam in tennis class as a teenager, with whom she maintained a strong friendship that became a declared love in 1985, shortly after returning from space. In 1982, before being selected for that mission, she had married a classmate, Steven Hawley, who appears in the documentary acknowledging: “We were more roommates than life partners.” Ride divorced in 1987, just like her husband and NASA, after discovering following the Challenger accident (in which her friend Resnik died) that the agency was not doing everything it should to protect its crew.

The astronaut hid her homosexuality until her death—“she was afraid and that breaks my heart,” her widow recounts now—and had good reasons for it. Her friend and famous tennis player Billie Jean King explains in the film the exemplary impact it must have had on Ride when she herself was dragged through the walk of shame in the early eighties after being outed as a lesbian, losing public favor and millions in contracts.

At the end of the documentary, a friend of Ride laments: “I found out [she was a lesbian] almost at the same time as the rest of the world: by reading her obituary. I was saddened that society could make someone we admire, love, and respect feel like she had to hide a part of herself.”

“Sally had to suppress a large part of her identity to break the highest glass ceiling,” says Cristina Costantini, screenwriter and director of the documentary, who warns, citing the current Trump Administration, that “many of the rights that were hard-won are once again threatened.” Just weeks ago, NASA removed from its website the express intention for a woman to set foot on the Moon in the next manned mission to the satellite, distancing the last glass ceiling remaining for women astronauts. Until the next Sally Ride manages to break it.