Latest news with #O'Shaughnessy
Irish Examiner
11-07-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
More than one in five people buy clothes from charity shops
More than one in five of us buy lots of clothes at a charity shop, vintage store, or flea market, with younger people more likely to be on the lookout for second-hand purchases. The Central Statistics Office has said that 22% of us bought between 11 and 50 pieces of second-hand clothing from a second-hand shop last year, with this figure rising to 30% for 17 to 34-year-olds. The statistics form part of a new series from the CSO on the waste and recycling behaviours of Irish households. Statistician Tadhg O'Shaughnessy said: 'Our aim for this release was to get a better understanding of how households dispose of their waste, to identify sources of irritating noise pollution, examine household radon testing, and to understand if households purchased second-hand items across 2024.' The survey found that four in five households disposed of non-recyclable waste using a wheelie bin collection service last year. The data showed that only 1% of households didn't recycle any of their recyclable waste. CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB Food waste Food waste was disposed of in a variety of ways, with 52% of households using the organic/brown bin, 22% putting it the general waste bin, 13% composting it at home, and 9% using it as feed for animals. Almost half of apartment dwellers said they put their food waste in the general waste bin compared to just 16% of those in semi-detached houses. Mr O'Shaughnessy said: 'Looking at noise pollution, 62% of households did not report any irritating noise pollution, however, for households who did experience irritation, the main source of noise pollution was from road traffic. 'Noise pollution from road traffic accounted for 18% of households, 14% from the noise pollution of dogs, and 10% from neighbouring houses.' He also said that renters were more likely to have problems with noise pollution than homeowners. Alongside clothes, the survey also asked participants if they bought second-hand furniture and electronics, with the vast majority saying they hadn't. However, 18% of people said they had bought at least one item of furniture second hand in the last year, with renters and younger people more likely to have done so. It was a similar situation for electronics, with 16% having bought at least one item in the last year. Read More Younger people drinking less but smoking more cannabis than older generations
Los Angeles Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Sally' explains why a trailblazing astronaut chose to stay in the closet
The name Sally Ride carries with it the hushed whispers of greatness. As the first American woman to go into space in 1983, Ride became an icon. Young girls who saw the famed astronaut on the cover of Newsweek, People and even Ms. Magazine witnessed a world of possibilities open up for them. That was the case for filmmaker Cristina Costantini. Her documentary 'Sally,' which premiered at Sundance, is an ode to her childhood hero. It will be broadcast Monday at 9 p.m. on National Geographic before streaming on Hulu and Disney+. 'I have been a fan of Sally since I was a little kid,' the filmmaker says on a teleconference call alongside Ride's longtime partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy. 'I painted a mural of her that still exists on my elementary school wall. I did a book report about her. The equation was simple: Seeing a woman doing big, brave things that women weren't supposed to be doing made me think that maybe I could do big things, too.' But 'Sally' isn't just a portrait of how a young Dodgers fan from Encino with wild ambitions made her way to NASA and became, as Costantini jokingly puts it, 'the very first Valley girl in space.' Instead, the documentary threads that well-known tale with a private one about how Ride kept her nearly three-decade relationship with O'Shaughnessy a secret until her death from cancer in 2012, when Ride's obituary made it public. Now, 'Sally' puts their love story front and center. Dramatizations, love letters, photographs and home videos paint a portrait of a happy couple who squirreled a life for themselves away from the public eye. Ride's sexuality is not treated merely as a footnote to her story, and the documentary asks viewers to understand why the astronaut opted to cordon off a part of her life and live inside a closet of her own making. 'I was worried that the film might be too hard on Sally,' O'Shaughnessy admits. 'Why couldn't she come out and'oh, poor Tam' and all that, you know?' she asks rhetorically. 'But that's not how it comes across. The fact of the matter is when Sally and I got together in the mid-'80s, it was a little dangerous to be open. You could miss out on lots of opportunities with your career, with projects you wanted to be involved in.' And like then, it feels dicey again today to be out, she says. 'But I think it's really good for young viewers of the film to see that there were good reasons for Sally and I to not be open to the public.' For context, 'Sally' offers two other contemporary coming-out narratives: those of Billie Jean King, whom Ride and O'Shaughnessy met during their tennis-playing years, and Karen 'Bear' Ride, Sally's sister. The former lost endorsements after her secretary outed her just as her tennis career was flourishing; the other was a trailblazing lesbian Presbyterian minister who advocated for the LGBTQ+ community. The experiences of King and Ride's sister, the doc suggests, influenced how and why the astronaut chose to marry a man while working at NASA — Steven Hawley, who appears in the film — and later decided to live a quiet, private life with O'Shaughnessy. Over the course of her career, Ride encountered sexism and misogyny from her peers and the press alike ('In your training, when there was a problem, how did you respond? Did you weep?' she was asked at a press conference). As a result, viewers might begin to understand why the famed astronaut chose to avoid further scrutiny, and likely homophobia, because of her public-facing role as NASA's poster girl. While the documentary neither castigates Ride for her choices nor absolves her of the thorny calculations she'd made to build the life she wanted for herself, 'Sally' is a poignant reminder that it's not always easy to parse questions about visibility and representation. So in her absence, O'Shaughnessy tries to set the record straight. Costantini's emphasis on their relationship in 'Sally' aims to show how it was integral to Ride's storied legacy. 'I think the kind of bravery that Sally had was the kind of bravery that as a kid you understand,' Costantini explains. 'Going up on basically a bomb into space — that's pretty scary in the moment and scary in a physical way. So as a kid, you have a fascination and appreciation for it. 'But Tam's kind of bravery — the ability to say who you are, even if you are hated for it, to have the moral courage to be who you were born to be, to tell the truth — I think that, as an adult, is a much harder thing to do,' she adds. As a portrait of a trailblazer, Costantini's film shows us that heroes are fallible. Learning about their humanity and the ways they wrestled with making their way in this world can be as eye-opening as it is enriching to their legacy. 'The project of the film is to place you in the history books alongside your amazing life partner,' Costantini tells O'Shaughnessy, fighting back tears. 'There's something about seeing you celebrated for the beautiful love story that you two had together, in public, that always gets me.' 'Even though Sally wasn't verbally out and definitely not out publicly, she still lived her life exactly the way she wanted to live it,' O'Shaughnessy says. 'She did the things she wanted to do. She loved the people she wanted to love. She was true to herself.'
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Partner of the First U.S. Woman in Space Reflects On Their Hidden Relationship
NASA Astronaut Sally Ride posing with her space helmet during her time in training as a mission specialist for NASA's STS-7 spaceflight. Credit - NASA History does not record if Sally Ride rolled her eyes when she got a look at the plans for the first toiletry kit NASA put together for its female astronauts—but she'd have been within her rights to do so. The space agency certainly knew how to pack for men, providing them more or less the basics—deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, razor. The women would get the essentials too, but there would be more: lipstick, blush, eyeliner, and, critically, up to 100 tampons—because who-all knew just how many the average woman would need during the average week in space? That first toiletry kit was planned before June 18, 1983, when Ride went aloft on the shuttle Challenger, becoming the first American woman in space, breaking the gender barrier the Soviets had broken with cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, just over 20 years to the day earlier. The tampon nonsense was not the only indignity NASA's female astronauts in general and Ride in particular had to endure. Her story is chronicled in the evocative new documentary Sally, a 2025 winner of the Sundance Film Festival's Alfred P. Sloan feature film prize. Among the memorable moments Ride experienced was the pre-flight press conference during which a TIME magazine correspondent raised his hand and asked, 'Dr. Ride, a couple of fast questions, sir…ma'am.' There was, too, the reporter who pointedly asked Ride 'Do you weep?' when confronted with a particularly knotty problem during training. There was the bouquet of flowers Ride was handed after the shuttle landed, intended as a gift to America's first space heroine—a gift Ride politely refused to accept, sparking all manner of criticism in the mainstream press. More important than all of that, though, was the private—exceedingly private—side to Ride, most notably her 27-year relationship with her life partner Tam O'Shaughnessy, a marriage-in-all-but-name that wasn't revealed until Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012 at age 61, and O'Shaughnessy told the world in the obituary she wrote to mark her mate's passing. Not long before Ride died, O'Shaughnessy gently broached how—and whether—she should reveal their more-than quarter century secret. 'I asked Sally about that. I said, you know, 'I'm kind of worried. I don't know what I'm going to write, you know, how I'm going to navigate this,'' O'Shaughnessy recalled in a recent conversation with TIME, ahead of the release of the film. 'And she said, 'You decide. Whatever you decide will be the right thing to do.'' The film, written, produced, and directed by Cristina Costantini, premiers on the National Geographic channel on June 16, and becomes available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on June 17. As it reveals, Sally and Tam made a lot of right—and tough—choices in the time they had together, and Ride did much the same when it came to the professional trajectory that took her to space. There is no minimizing just how alien the notion of female astronauts was at the start, at least in the U.S. The film includes a clip of Gordon Cooper, one of NASA's original seven astronauts, being interviewed in the early 1960s. 'Is there any room in the space program for a woman?' the reporter asked. 'Well,' Cooper answered without a trace of a smile, 'we could have used a woman and flown her instead of the chimpanzee.' It wasn't until 1976, a decade and a half after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, that NASA opened up its astronaut selection process to women and people of color. More than 8,000 hopefuls applied; in 1978, NASA selected 35 of them to become astronauts, including three Black people, one Asian American, and six women. Ride was among them, as was Judith Resnik, who would lose her life when the shuttle Challenger exploded at the start of its tenth mission in January 1986. There was a great deal of handicapping inside and outside of NASA as to which woman would fly first—much the way there was among the men in the run-up to Shepard's flight in 1961—and Ride and Resnik were considered the leading candidates. Ultimately, as Sally recounts, Ride was chosen because she struck NASA mission planners as slightly less distracted by the celebrity attending being number one, focusing more on the mission and less on the history she would make. 'She loved physics and she loved space exploration,' says O'Shaughnessy, 'and with those things she could be intense, driven.' Ride loved O'Shaughnessy too—though it was a devotion that was a long time in the making. The two met when Ride was 13 and O'Shaughnessy was 12 and they were standing in line to check in to play in a tennis tournament in Southern California, where they both grew up. Ride repeatedly rose restlessly to her tiptoes, and O'Shaughnessy said, ''You're walking on your toes like a ballet dancer,'' she recalls in the film. 'That kind of started our friendship. Sally was kind of quiet, but she would talk for eight minutes straight on different players and how to beat 'em, how to whup 'em.' The two grew quickly close, but went in different directions, with Ride studying physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for three semesters beginning in 1968 and later at UCLA for the summer semester before transferring to Stanford as a junior, and O'Shaughnessy becoming a professional tennis player from 1971 to 1974, ultimately playing in both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. O'Shaughnessy accepted her sexuality early, openly, and enthusiastically. 'I was on the tennis circuit and there were a few queer women,' she told TIME. 'But it was also just the atmosphere, even the straight women. No one really cared who you slept with…I was going to the gay bars in San Francisco and dancing with my friends.' For Ride, things were different. When she was at Stanford she fell in love with her female roommate and the two were together for four years. But Ride insisted on keeping the relationship largely under wraps and that secrecy was a no-go for her partner. 'She couldn't stand being so closeted and decided to move on with her life,' says O'Shaughnessy. Ride would later choose an opposite sex partner, marrying fellow astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982, a move that was more than just an accommodating pose for a public figure in a country not ready for same-sex marriage, but less than a true union of the heart. 'They were really good friends,' O'Shaughnessy says. 'They had a lot in common. He was an astronomer, Sally was a physicist. They had stuff to talk about. They were both so thrilled to be selected to be astronauts and they both liked sports, so I think they had a solid friendship.' It wasn't enough. The two divorced in 1987, but even before they did, Ride and O'Shaughnessy began drifting together as more than just friends. At the time, O'Shaughnessy was living in Atlanta, after retiring from the tennis circuit; Ride, who was living in Houston, would visit her frequently. 'I never thought we would become romantic,' O'Shaughnessy says, 'but it just turned that way one afternoon in the spring of 1985. When she would come to town, we would typically go for runs and long walks and just spend time together. Back at my place one day, we were just talking. I had an old cocker spaniel named Annie, I leaned over to pet her, and the next thing I knew, Sally's hand was on my lower back. And it felt unusual. I turned to look at her and I could tell she was in love with me.' As O'Shaughnessy recalls in the film, she said, 'Oh boy, we're in trouble.' Ride responded, 'We don't have to be. We don't have to do this.' Then they kissed. Ride would ultimately fly twice in space, going aloft the second time in 1984, once again aboard the shuttle Challenger. After that snake-bit ship came to tragic ruin, exploding 73 seconds into its last flight and claiming the lives of all seven crewmembers, Ride and Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon, served on the commission that investigated the causes of the accident. Ride left NASA in 1987, accepting a fellowship at Stanford and later became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. In 1989, O'Shaughnessy moved out west to live with her. It would not be until 2013, a year after Ride's death, that California would permanently legalize gay marriage, and it would not be until 2015 that the Supreme Court would do the same nationwide. That was alright with Ride, who, as with her relationship with her college roommate, continued to believe that her love for O'Shaughnessy should remain a quiet and relatively private thing. But all that began to change in 2011. It was early that year that Ride first showed signs of illness—poor appetite and yellowing cheeks. Her doctor diagnosed pancreatic cancer. 'The doctor never said what stage. He never said the worst stage. We thought she was going to get better, and we were trying everything,' O'Shaughnessy recalls. 'She was doing acupuncture, we were meditating, we became vegans. And then one day, we're at the oncologist, and he said, 'It's time for hospice.' And Sally and I were, like, shocked.' Not long before Ride died, the couple grew concerned that O'Shaughnessy would not be allowed to visit her in the hospital, help make critical care decisions, or share property because they were not married—and could not be in California. So they went for the next best thing, registering as certified domestic partners, which afforded them the necessary rights. 'It's the worst phrase,' says O'Shaughnessy. 'We used to call each other certified domestic hens, because it's such a bad term.' Whatever name they went by, they would not get to enjoy their newly legalized status for long. Ride passed on July 23, 2012, just 17 months after she was diagnosed. At first NASA planned no formal memorial or celebration of Ride's life. Then, the next month, Armstrong died and a memorial was held at the Washington National Cathedral, with 1,500 people in attendance. 'I got mad,' O'Shaughnessy says. She called then-Senator Barbara Mikulski (D, Md.) who chaired the Senate Committee on Appropriations and oversaw NASA's budget. Mikulski called then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who at first offered up a relatively intimate affair for 300 people at the National Air and Space Museum. O'Shaughnessy pressed, and ultimately won approval for a far more prepossessing event at the Kennedy Center in 2013. Today, Ride's legacy lives on in Sally Ride Science, a nonprofit founded by Ride and O'Shaughnessy in 2001 to inspire girls to become scientifically literate and to draw girls and women into the STEM fields. It lives on too in astronaut Peggy Whitson, who now holds the U.S. record for most time spent in space, at 675 days over four missions. It lives on in Christina Koch, who will become the first woman to travel to the moon, when she flies aboard Artemis II on its circumlunar journey in 2026. It lives on in NASA's current 46-person astronaut corps, of whom 19 are women. Ride flew high, Ride flew fast, and Ride flew first—doing service to both science and human equity in the process. Sally powerfully tells her tale. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at
Time Magazine
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Partner of the First U.S. Woman in Space Reflects On Their Hidden Relationship
History does not record if Sally Ride rolled her eyes when she got a look at the plans for the first toiletry kit NASA put together for its female astronauts—but she'd have been within her rights to do so. The space agency certainly knew how to pack for men, providing them more or less the basics—deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, razor. The women would get the essentials too, but there would be more: lipstick, blush, eyeliner, and, critically, up to 100 tampons—because who-all knew just how many the average woman would need during the average week in space? That first toiletry kit was planned before June 18, 1983, when Ride went aloft on the shuttle Challenger, becoming the first American woman in space, breaking the gender barrier the Soviets had broken with cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, just over 20 years to the day earlier. The tampon nonsense was not the only indignity NASA's female astronauts in general and Ride in particular had to endure. Her story is chronicled in the evocative new documentary Sally, a 2025 winner of the Sundance Film Festival 's Alfred P. Sloan feature film prize. Among the memorable moments Ride experienced was the pre-flight press conference during which a TIME magazine correspondent raised his hand and asked, 'Dr. Ride, a couple of fast questions, sir…ma'am.' There was, too, the reporter who pointedly asked Ride 'Do you weep?' when confronted with a particularly knotty problem during training. There was the bouquet of flowers Ride was handed after the shuttle landed, intended as a gift to America's first space heroine—a gift Ride politely refused to accept, sparking all manner of criticism in the mainstream press. More important than all of that, though, was the private— exceedingly private—side to Ride, most notably her 27-year relationship with her life partner Tam O'Shaughnessy, a marriage-in-all-but-name that wasn't revealed until Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012 at age 61, and O'Shaughnessy told the world in the obituary she wrote to mark her mate's passing. Not long before Ride died, O'Shaughnessey gently broached how—and whether—she should reveal their more-than quarter century secret. 'I asked Sally about that. I said, you know, 'I'm kind of worried. I don't know what I'm going to write, you know, how I'm going to navigate this,'' O'Shaughnessy recalled in a recent conversation with TIME, ahead of the release of the film. 'And she said, 'You decide. Whatever you decide will be the right thing to do.'' The film, written, produced, and directed by Cristina Constantine, premiers on the National Geographic channel on June 16, and becomes available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on June 17. As it reveals, Sally and Tam made a lot of right—and tough—choices in the time they had together, and Ride did much the same when it came to the professional trajectory that took her to space. There is no minimizing just how alien the notion of female astronauts was at the start, at least in the U.S. The film includes a clip of Gordon Cooper, one of NASA's original seven astronauts, being interviewed in the early 1960s. 'Is there any room in the space program for a woman?' the reporter asked. 'Well,' Cooper answered without a trace of a smile, 'we could have used a woman and flown her instead of the chimpanzee.' It wasn't until 1976, a decade and a half after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, that NASA opened up its astronaut selection process to women and people of color. More than 8,000 hopefuls applied; in 1978, NASA selected 35 of them to become astronauts, including three Black people, one Asian American, and six women. Ride was among them, as was Judith Resnik, who would lose her life when the shuttle Challenger exploded at the start of its tenth mission in January 1986. There was a great deal of handicapping inside and outside of NASA as to which woman would fly first—much the way there was among the men in the run-up to Shepard's flight in 1961—and Ride and Resnik were considered the leading candidates. Ultimately, as Sally recounts, Ride was chosen because she struck NASA mission planners as slightly less distracted by the celebrity attending being number one, focusing more on the mission and less on the history she would make. 'She loved physics and she loved space exploration,' says O'Shaughnessey, 'and with those things she could be intense, driven.' Ride loved O'Shaughnessey too—though it was a devotion that was a long time in the making. The two met when Ride was 13 and O'Shaughnessey was 12 and they were standing in line to check in to play in a tennis tournament in Southern California, where they both grew up. Ride repeatedly rose restlessly to her tiptoes, and O'Shaughenessy said, ''You're walking on your toes like a ballet dancer,'' she recalls in the film. 'That kind of started our friendship. Sally was kind of quiet, but she would talk for eight minutes straight on different players and how to beat 'em, how to whup 'em.' The two grew quickly close, but went in different directions, with Ride studying physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for three semesters beginning in 1968 and later at UCLA for the summer semester before transferring to Stanford as a junior, and O'Shaughnessey becoming a professional tennis player from 1971 to 1974, ultimately playing in both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. O'Shaughnessy accepted her sexuality early, openly, and enthusiastically. 'I was on the tennis circuit and there were a few queer women,' she told TIME. 'But it was also just the atmosphere, even the straight women. No one really cared who you slept with…I was going to the gay bars in San Francisco and dancing with my friends.' For Ride, things were different. When she was at Stanford she fell in love with her female roommate and the two were together for four years. But Ride insisted on keeping the relationship largely under wraps and that secrecy was a no-go for her partner. 'She couldn't stand being so closeted and decided to move on with her life,' says O'Shaughnessy. Ride would later choose an opposite sex partner, marrying fellow astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982, a move that was more than just an accommodating pose for a public figure in a country not ready for same-sex marriage, but less than a true union of the heart. 'They were really good friends,' O'Shaughnessy says. 'They had a lot in common. He was an astronomer, Sally was a physicist. They had stuff to talk about. They were both so thrilled to be selected to be astronauts and they both liked sports, so I think they had a solid friendship.' It wasn't enough. The two divorced in 1987, but even before they did, Ride and O'Shaughnessy began drifting together as more than just friends. At the time, O'Shaughnessy was living in Atlanta, after retiring from the tennis circuit; Ride, who was living in Houston, would visit her frequently. 'I never thought we would become romantic,' O'Shaughnessy says, 'but it just turned that way one afternoon in the spring of 1985. When she would come to town, we would typically go for runs and long walks and just spend time together. Back at my place one day, we were just talking. I had an old cocker spaniel named Annie, I leaned over to pet her, and the next thing I knew, Sally's hand was on my lower back. And it felt unusual. I turned to look at her and I could tell she was in love with me.' As O'Shaughnessy recalls in the film, she said, 'Oh boy, we're in trouble.' Ride responded, 'We don't have to be. We don't have to do this.' Then they kissed. Ride would ultimately fly twice in space, going aloft the second time in 1984, once again aboard the shuttle Challenger. After that snake-bit ship came to tragic ruin, exploding 73 seconds into its last flight and claiming the lives of all seven crewmembers, Ride and Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon, served on the commission that investigated the causes of the accident. Ride left NASA in 1987, accepting a fellowship at Stanford and later became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. In 1989, O'Shaughnessy moved out west to live with her. It would not be until 2013, a year after Ride's death, that California would permanently legalize gay marriage, and it would not be until 2015 that the Supreme Court would do the same nationwide. That was alright with Ride, who, as with her relationship with her college roommate, continued to believe that her love for O'Shaughnessy should remain a quiet and relatively private thing. But all that began to change in 2011. It was early that year that Ride first showed signs of illness—poor appetite and yellowing cheeks. Her doctor diagnosed pancreatic cancer. 'The doctor never said what stage. He never said the worst stage. We thought she was going to get better, and we were trying everything,' O'Shaughnessy recalls. 'She was doing acupuncture, we were meditating, we became vegans. And then one day, we're at the oncologist, and he said, 'It's time for hospice.' And Sally and I were, like, shocked.' Not long before Ride died, the couple grew concerned that O'Shaughnessy would not be allowed to visit her in the hospital, help make critical care decisions, or share property because they were not married—and could not be in California. So they went for the next best thing, registering as certified domestic partners, which afforded them the necessary rights. 'It's the worst phrase,' says O'Shaughnessy. 'We used to call each other certified domestic hens, because it's such a bad term.' Whatever name they went by, they would not get to enjoy their newly legalized status for long. Ride passed on July 23, 2012, just 17 months after she was diagnosed. At first NASA planned no formal memorial or celebration of Ride's life. Then, the next month, Armstrong died and a memorial was held at the Washington National Cathedral, with 1,500 people in attendance. 'I got mad,' O'Shaughnessy says. She called then-Senator Barbara Mikulski (D, Md.) who chaired the Senate Committee on Appropriations and oversaw NASA's budget. Mikulski called then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who at first offered up a relatively intimate affair for 300 people at the National Air and Space Museum. O'Shaughnessy pressed, and ultimately won approval for a far more prepossessing event at the Kennedy Center in 2013. Today, Ride's legacy lives on in Sally Ride Science, a nonprofit founded by Ride and O'Shaughnessy in 2001 to inspire girls to become scientifically literate and to draw girls and women into the STEM fields. It lives on too in astronaut Peggy Whitson, who now holds the U.S. record for most time spent in space, at 675 days over four missions. It lives on in Christina Koch, who will become the first woman to travel to the moon, when she flies aboard Artemis II on its circumlunar journey in 2026. It lives on in NASA's current 46-person astronaut corps, of whom 19 are women. Ride flew high, Ride flew fast, and Ride flew first—doing service to both science and human equity in the process. Sally powerfully tells her tale.
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
An Inside Look Into the Private Life of Late Astronaut Sally Ride, as Told by Her Partner Tam (Exclusive Clip)
An Inside Look Into the Private Life of Late Astronaut Sally Ride, as Told by Her Partner Tam (Exclusive Clip) originally appeared on Parade. Tam O'Shaughnessy is sharing the true story of her 27-year relationship with iconic astronaut Sally Ride. In National Geographic's new documentary Sally, O'Shaughnessy, 73, gives insight into the pair's partnership for the first time ever, reflecting on their romance and the sacrifices they both made during their decades-long relationship. O'Shaughnessy and Ride were together until the astronaut's death from pancreatic cancer at age 61 in 2012. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 'Most people only know of Sally as the first American woman in space. Of course, that was no small accomplishment! But Sally was so much more,' O'Shaughnessy exclusively tells Parade. 'She was an athlete, a physicist (she thought of herself as a physicist), a science writer and a champion of science education for all students. We kept our relationship private because of the culture of hostility and discrimination toward LGBTQ+ people at the time. Our families and close friends knew we were a couple, but few others did.' O'Shaughnessy goes on to tell Parade that a few days before Ride died in hospice, she told her she wanted to hold a celebration of life for friends, families and colleagues who helped them build their science education company, Sally Ride Science, as well as her friends at NASA. 'Suddenly I wondered out loud, 'Who am I going to be to the people who don't know we were a couple? Who am I going to be to the world?' Sally thought about it for a moment and then said, 'You decide. Whatever you decide will be the right thing to do,'' O'Shaughnessy recalls. 'Shortly after our conversation, I made up my mind. I decided to be honest. I was very proud of Sally, of our extraordinary relationship, and of the life we built together.' As for what it means to O'Shaughnessy that Sally will premiere during Pride month, the former professional tennis player says there's no better time, explaining to Parade what she hopes people from the LGBTQ+ community will take away from the documentary. Related: 85 'Happy Pride Month' Wishes To Send to Friends and Family 'Never let anyone try to tell you what you should do with your life or whom you should love,' she says. 'Just like Sally, think for yourself and follow your heart. This message is especially crucial now, when the rights of the LGBTQ+ community are under attack. Always be true to yourself. That's how Sally lived her life, even though she kept a part of it private. It's a powerful and universal message.' Directed, written and produced by Emmy Award-winning director Cristina Costantini, Sally also features appearances by tennis legend and advocate Billie Jean King, ex-husband Steve Hawley, fellow NASA class of 1978 astronauts Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher and John Fabian, sister Bear Ride, mom Joyce Ride and longtime friend and journalist Lynn Sherr. Watch Parade's exclusive clip of Sally, which premieres Monday, June 16, on National Geographic and is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu the following day, below. An Inside Look Into the Private Life of Late Astronaut Sally Ride, as Told by Her Partner Tam (Exclusive Clip) first appeared on Parade on Jun 3, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 3, 2025, where it first appeared.
