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In the alternate-history TV show For All Mankind, a character has to hide being a lesbian because in that timeline, NASA only allows for straight astronauts. Same thing in this timeline, because no fucking way was America going to send Sally Ride into space had they known she was gay.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 23, 2012--
The Soviets sent a woman into space two decades before the U.S. did. With the USSR also sending Svetlana Savitskaya up the year previous, Ride, who had a PhD in physics from Stanford, became the third woman in space when she traveled as a mission specialist aboard Challenger on June 18, 1983.
In the 60s there was a privately run and funded group of American women who went through preliminary astronaut training later misnamed the “Mercury 13,” but they weren’t NASA affiliated and NASA had no interest despite how well the women performed. It only wanted military trained jet test pilots for its astronauts, which women weren’t allowed to be, so they were automatically excluded.
Sally Ride did a second Challenger mission in 1984, bringing her total time spent in space to two weeks. She had been training for a third mission when the Challenger disaster occurred in 1986, cancelling the mission. Ride was part of the commission that investigated the accident; she retired from NASA in 1987.
As the first American woman into space, Ride was an icon to many young girls for breaking sexist barriers; they were inspired to pursue careers in science because of Sally’s example. She wrote and co-authored several children’s book on space that encouraged the study of science.
But her private life was just that—intensely private. In 1982 she married fellow astronaut Steven Hawley, but they divorced in 1987. Ride became sick in 2011 with pancreatic cancer; it was kept secret. The public didn’t know she was ill until news of her death on July 23, 2012. And it was in her obituary that another secret was revealed.
The obituary referred to Tam O’Shaughnessy as Ride’s “partner of 27 years.” This made Sally Ride NASA’s first acknowledged gay astronaut. If you do the math, Sally and Tam had been together since 1985, when Ride was still at NASA. Sally’s younger sister Bear Ride is a gay presbyterian minister. She wrote in a tribute to her big sister, “I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them.”
Tam O’Shaughnessy is a former professional tennis player and children’s author who co-founded the children’s education company Sally Ride Science with Sally. The company was relaunched as a nonprofit in 2015, with O’Shaughnessy as executive director. Tam later explained their choice not to come out earlier being based on how it would negatively affect their ability to secure corporate sponsorships. Can’t have two gay people running an organization that teaches kids science, don’t ya know.
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