Sally Ride accomplished multiple firsts when she entered orbit in 1983 at the age of 32, breaking barriers for female astronauts and women in science.
Following her death in 2012 at age 61, a new documentary Sally, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, explores the lesser-known truths about Ride’s 27-year romance with life partner Tam O’Shaughnessy, as well as Ride’s rise at NASA and journey to becoming the first American woman in space.
In the film, Kathy Sullivan, a scientist and former astronaut from Ride’s NASA class, also credits Ride with becoming “the first woman to take stock of what they call crew equipment.”
With Ride onboard, NASA engineers had to rethink the kind of “crew equipment,” or toiletry kit, that was routinely provided for astronauts. They reassessed the conventional set of items, such as antiperspirant sticks and dental floss, so that the contents would be suitable for a woman.
“They knew that a guy might want a shaving kit, but they didn’t know what a female astronaut would take,” Ride explains in a historic clip. “And so the engineers at NASA, in their infinite wisdom, designed a makeup kit.”
What Ride jokingly called “a makeup kit brought to you by NASA engineers” included eye makeup remover, an eye-shading pencil and some version of lipstick, all wrapped up in a spring-loaded canvas bag.
The kit became more absurd when Ride said they asked how many tampons she should fly with for one week.
“He asked me, ‘Is 100 the right number?’ ” Ride says with a laugh. “I said, ‘No. That would not be the right number.’ ”
Sullivan recalls when Ride kept pulling tampons out of the bag, comparing it to “one of those exploding snakes in a party trick.”
Reflecting on the handful of women who were inducted into the historic NASA class with Ride, Sullivan says, “All six of us for at least half a year would not have used every tampon that was in there.”
While Ride jokingly revisits that episode in the documentary, she also addresses more serious matters, including her run-ins with the media. “The only bad moments in our training involved the press,” she says.
Sally includes footage of reporters asking if Ride’s male colleagues “defer” to her or continue their “gentlemanly ways” in training. In multiple clips, she’s asked about children and whether she would be a mother.
“They didn’t care about how well-prepared I was to operate the arm or deploy communication satellites,” Ride says. “They wanted to know what I thought was extraneous things.”
Sally will be screening at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival through Feb. 2 and available to view online from Jan. 30 to Feb. 3. Click here for more information.
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