Documentary film “Sally”, which is currently available on Disney+, presents the complex life story of Sally Ride, who was one of the most famous female trailblazers in US during the 20th century. She really tried hard to become a notable figure in the NASA history, and she did succeed in getting recognized and respected for her significant achievement, but she also had to sacrifice a lot of her personal feelings for understandable reasons.

On the surface, Ride was like an almost perfect model example showing that women can do anything as much as men. Thanks to her progressive parents, she and her younger sister were often encouraged to follow their hopes and dreams as much as they could, and, despite frequently daunted by all the bias and discrimination against girls, young Ride kept going before eventually applying for the NASA astronaut program around the late 1970s.

Fortunately, Ride was at the right time for her big aspiration. As shown in 2018 Netflix documentary film “Mercury 13”, NASA actually considered sending female astronauts to the space in the 1960s, and those female candidates selected at that time turned out to be more qualified than many of male astronauts, but, sadly, their hope and dream were discarded in the end due to a lot of sexism in the male-dominated environment of NASA. As shown in recent documentary film “The Space Race” (2023), which is also available on Disney+, NASA belatedly considered more inclusion for women and minority races in the next decade, and that was how Reid and five other women were eventually allowed to join NASA.

Of course, Ride and her fellow female astronauts were all aware well of how much they had to try and work for making that historical moment for women someday. Besides enduring the frequent sexism from many male astronauts and engineers in NASA, they also had to compete with each other everyday just because NASA allowed only one of them to go to the space, and, as her several surviving colleagues remember, Ride was quite competitive to say the least. Compared to her main competitor Judith Resnik, she was usually more focused without being that social, and that calmly professional attitude of hers eventually helped her earn that coveted opportunity in the end.

Of course, as she frankly admitted later, Reid was quite nervous as preparing for her first time in the space along with several male astronauts during several months of 1983. After all, anything could have gone quite right wrong once the launch of the space shuttle was started, but she stayed cool as demanded by her historical moment to come, and she succeeded in accomplishing her first space mission in the end. 

After returning from the space, Ride quickly became one of the most famous women in the world, and she enjoyed this sudden public fame to some degree, but there was a serious personal matter behind her. Around the time when she entered her adolescent period, she became aware of her homosexuality, and she actually had a girlfriend during her college years before joining NASA, though she did not tell anyone about that homosexual relationship of hers.  

In the middle of her NASA period, Ride married one of her male colleagues, but her ex-husband, who eventually divorced her several years later, frankly reveals that they were pretty much like roommates instead of a real married couple mainly because both of them were frequently busy with their respective jobs. In addition, Ride also found herself getting attracted to Tam O’Shaughnessy, an old friend of hers who had been a lot more honest about being a lesbian than Ride. At first, they frequently hung around with each other as close friends, but then they became franker about their mutual attraction, and that was the beginning of their long partnership, which turned out to be much more enduring than expected.

Nevertheless, Ride kept hiding their relationship from others in public to her partner’s growing frustration. When she subsequently left NASA after getting quite devastated and disillusioned due to a shocking tragic accident in 1986 which killed several NASA astronauts including Resnik, Ride became less burdened about her closeted status than before, but she still hesitated to come out of her closet. This led to a big crisis in her relationship with O’Shaughnessy, but, after a serious personal conversation between them, her partner chose to continue to live with Ride because, well, Ride still could make her laugh as before.

Ride did appreciate her partner’s patient understanding, and her last few years poignantly show that it is never too late as long as you are still alive. Becoming far less afraid of what others think about her around that point, Ride finally decided to do what should have been done for her as well as her dear partner, and O’Shaughnessy stood by her to the end as they showed more love and appreciation to each other. 

Although it could go deeper into its main subject for more insight, “Sally” provides us fairly enough enlightenment on Ride’s life and career at least, and director/co-writer/co-producer Christina Constantini handles her human subject with enough care and respect on the whole. It is often sad to observe how much she hid and sacrificed behind her strong and confident appearance, but Ride did her best for her life and career nonetheless, and that is certainly admirable in my inconsequential opinion.