In 'Sally' (2025), A Love Story From Outer Space

Tam O'Shaughnessy finally gets to share her love for Sally Ride with the world

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NASA/National Geographic

In the 2025 documentary Sally, director Cristina Costantini brings a space icon back down to earth. Sally Ride was a national hero, an inspiration to women everywhere, and at one point, probably the most famous woman on the planet. She always kept her personal life to herself, but after her death from pancreatic cancer in 2012, we learned that she was even more private than we knew.

The obituary released by her nonprofit, Sally Ride Science, referred to a woman, Tam O'Shaughnessy, as her “partner of 27 years.” This revelation was the moment Costantini first realized there was so much more to Ride’s story, and when she met O'Shaughnessy for the first time, she knew this story needed to be told.

The film is structured like a typical biographical documentary, detailing her childhood and her journey to become a NASA astronaut. We learn about Ride’s emotionally distant mother (who appears in the documentary only to refuse to answer Costantini’s questions) and hear from her sister Bear, an out lesbian minister whom Sally never came out to. Ride’s classmates and coworkers from NASA chime in, noting her impressive proficiency alongside her competitive, reserved personality.

But it’s O'Shaughnessy, who met Ride when they were kids at tennis camp, that serves as the film’s narrator. O'Shaughnessy shares a story parallel to Ride’s rise to the top at NASA – the story of Ride’s life behind closed doors and her relationship with the love of her life. O'Shaughnessy is an incredible storyteller, and her anecdotes about Ride are thoughtful, witty, and at times brutally honest. It’s clear that she’s a fierce, formidable woman, even though she had to dim parts of herself for Ride’s benefit.

Sally Ride and Tam O'Shaughnessy.

O'Shaughnessy contextualizes Ride’s life the way no one else could. She recalls when Billie Jean King – presumably an influential figure for the tennis-loving Ride – lost her sponsorships and her career after she was outed, suggesting that this must have deeply affected Ride and influenced her decision to stay in the closet. She tells us how they fell in love, and the moment they decided they had to be together, all while Ride was at the height of her NASA career. As Costantini noted at Sundance, “Telling this intrepid space story side by side with an intimate love story was kind of the project of the film.”

While Sally utilizes many of the tools of a middle-of-the-road, talking head-style doc, it resists simplification or moralizing. It goes beyond the inspirational, you can do anything kind of tale you might expect. “There’s this whole other more nuanced story, more interesting story about what it means when our heroes have to hurt the people they love the most for the benefit of people they never meet,” Costantini explained.

This is mostly due to O'Shaughnessy’s involvement, as she is quite clear-eyed when it comes to describing Ride’s less admirable qualities without ever wavering in her love or devotion. “Some of the very characteristics that made her the woman who could break the highest glass ceiling made her tough to be in a relationship with,” O'Shaughnessy shares. Costantini has called O'Shaughnessy an “interpreter” for Sally, and in many ways, she operates as the guardian of Ride’s true self. Through Sally, we learn that our hero was also a human being.

O'Shaughnessy in Sally (2025).

Due to the context of its release, Sally isn’t exactly a story of how far we’ve come today, either. Considering the current attack on LGBTQ rights and the widespread rollback of science funding, Ride’s struggles in the 1980s feel more relevant than ever. Indeed, rather than serving up a straightforward hero’s journey about overcoming obstacles, the film can also be read as a cautionary tale about the emotional and political cost of hiding oneself.

But it’s not just Ride who hid from the world. The documentary also works as a restorative project for O'Shaughnessy, who never got the recognition she deserved while Ride was still alive. As Costantini told NPR, astronauts have always stood next to their wives, who were celebrated along with their husbands. O'Shaughnessy never got to stand beside Ride and publicly share in her achievements, and this documentary finally gives her a chance to enter the story.

O'Shaughnessy’s devotion to Ride meant she had to carry all of this alone for decades, no doubt a heartbreaking feat. It wasn’t until Ride was on her deathbed that she told O'Shaughnessy that she could share their relationship after once was gone (though they officially became domestic partners after Ride got sick). In perhaps the most moving moment in the entire film, we watch O'Shaughnessy as she accepts the Presidential Medal of Freedom in honor of Ride in 2013, finally getting recognition from the highest office in the country.

At one point in the movie, Ride describes, in a voiceover, the profound experience of looking at Earth from outer space. “You can look at Earth’s horizon and see this really, really thin royal blue line, and then you realize it’s Earth’s atmosphere, and that that’s all there is of it. It’s about as thick as the fuzz on a tennis ball,” she says. “From that perspective… all the arbitrary restrictions we place on ourselves and on each other, they mean nothing.”

The tragedy of the film is that these restrictions did affect Ride greatly in her life, even as she recognized their falsity. Near the end of Sally, O'Shaughnessy tells us that she’s spent years thinking about why Ride couldn’t be open about her sexuality or their relationship, and there’s only one answer she’s been able to come up with: Sally was afraid.

It’s deeply sad that the first American woman in space couldn’t share herself and her love with the world, nor her closest friends and family. But it’s happy, too, that she got to spend 27 years of her life with the woman she loved. Though the film must offer a deep sense of relief and validation for O'Shaughnessy after all her years of silence, by sharing this story, she’s given us a gift, too. The gift of a great love story, finally told.

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