Kristen Stewart is stepping into one of the most defining roles of her career, portraying Sally Ride in ‘The Challenger‘, a new limited series that revisits not just a historic milestone but a turning point in NASA’s history.
While many remember Sally Ride as the first American woman in space, this series digs deeper into the events that followed, the institutional failures she helped uncover, and the legacy she changed behind the scenes.
‘The Challenger’ Shows Sally Ride’s Rise As The First American Woman In Space
Sally Ride’s path to NASA wasn’t easy. Before she ever stepped into a spacecraft, she showed remarkable promise as a tennis player, even earning a scholarship to the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles. But Ride chose a different path. She returned to California and enrolled at Stanford University, where she pursued both English and physics, and finally earned her bachelor’s degree in 1973.
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In 1977, while working as a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in laser physics, Ride applied to NASA, when the agency had just begun accepting women into its astronaut program. Out of thousands of applicants, she was selected in 1978 as one of six women in a group of 35 astronauts. She completed her training in 1979, earned a pilot’s license, and quickly stood out, especially for her skill with the shuttle’s robotic arm.
That expertise secured her a place on the STS-7 mission. On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride launched aboard the Challenger, becoming the first American woman in space. Over six days, she helped deploy two communications satellites and carried out multiple experiments.
Challenger Disaster Pulls Back The Curtain On The System’s Internal Failures
Ride was preparing for a third mission when tragedy struck. On January 28, 1986, the Challenger shuttle exploded shortly after launch, forcing NASA to suspend its shuttle program for more than two years. The disaster shocked the world, but it became a major turning point in Sally’s career.
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She joined the presidential commission tasked with investigating the explosion and took on a role that required her to critically examine the same system she had once represented. The investigation revealed that the failure stemmed from faulty O-rings in the solid rocket boosters, which lost flexibility in cold temperatures and failed to seal properly. Eventually, it allowed hot gases to escape, destroying the shuttle.
While physicist Richard Feynman publicly demonstrated the issue, Ride’s role in bringing the evidence to light remained hidden forever. In fact, Ride’s role stayed largely unknown until after her death in 2012.
‘The Challenger’, based on Meredith E. Bagby’s The New Guys, brings this lesser-known dimension of Ride’s life to the forefront. Instead of focusing only on the disaster, the series explores the broader journey of NASA’s 1978 astronaut class. And given Kristen Stewart’s ability to portray complex women, she seems well-suited to capture Ride’s historic achievement and the internal conflict that came later.
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