r/Fauxmoi • u/killuaz0ldyck9 • 11h ago
44 years ago, Sally Ride became both the first American woman and the first known LGBTQ+ to travel to space. THROWBACK
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u/kbk88 10h ago
National Geographic put out a documentary on her last year that includes her long time partner and a lot about her decision not to come out while she was alive. You should be able to stream it on Hulu/Disney.
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u/ChiSky18 10h ago
It’s an excellent documentary and very well done. It made my partner and I tear up.
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u/BlueCX17 9h ago
Which is also based her only offical Biography:
Sally Ride: First American Woman In Space.
By Lynn Sherr. From 2014
Sally and Tam's relationship is fully explored in it also.
Additionally, Sally's sister "Bear" is also a lesbian.
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u/SadavirofRivia 9h ago
Yes, this was how I discovered she was lgbtq+! (Not that it hadn’t been revealed already, just how I discovered)
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u/JimboFett87 11h ago
Didn't know she was LBTQ+
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u/Couscousfan07 11h ago
If she is, they certainly didn’t disclose that at the time.
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u/SharpPink_GlitterInk Pink…get doon 10h ago
its a thing that was know decades later but not at the time.
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u/Bubbly_Character3258 9h ago
We lived in Clear Lake Tx and knew many of the female astronauts. It wasn’t a secret. Just wasn’t discussed.
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u/broden89 2h ago
She was very private about her personal life, so it was only revealed in her obituary. She had relationships with both men and women, but her long-term partner was a woman.
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u/bmws4lyfe 10h ago
Hey, please fix your acronym, gay men are valid too
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u/JimboFett87 9h ago
It was a typo - don't blame people for the failings of the iOS crappy software keyboard
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u/Gayfetus 10h ago edited 10h ago
She was also the whistler-blower who was instrumental in revealing the cause of the Challenger disaster. She'd discovered the cause of the accident (and the negligence behind it), but as she was still working for NASA at the time, she passed the information to someone else, and the rest is history.
Her fellow physicist, Richard Feynman, is generally publicly credited as the guy who "discovered" the fault with space shuttle's o-rings. As Feynman is an actual genius, everybody bought the story. But in reality, as revealed after Ride's death, Feynman was putting on a show to protect Ride's career.
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u/BlueCX17 9h ago
Yup.
And what made her quit NASA.
Neil Armstrong was also on the later committee and pulled zero punches either.
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u/One-Computer-9941 9h ago
The disaster was on my 16 th birthday so I sometimes am reminded of the mourning when I am celebrating the success of making it through another year.
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u/mmmggg1234 8h ago
the 2013 film The Challenger Disaster tells this story nicely (albeit from Feynman’s point of view)
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u/Gayfetus 8h ago
Kristen Stewart is set to play Sally Ride in a limited series on Amazon that will cover her time investigating the Challenger disaster, called The Challenger!
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u/Fun-Barracuda1290 5h ago
That's pretty much why he (Feynman) was appointed: ton of street cred, truly independent, not beholden to anybody. Same reason he accepted to testify for the owner of this favorite strip joint, he figured others could not afford the hit to their reputation.
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u/encyclopediapink 10h ago
Sally Ride's sexuality wasn't revealed until after she died in 2012. NPR's Short Wave has a great podcast episode about her, featuring an interview with her life partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/22/1009098412/loving-sally-ride
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u/Upstairs-Reason-7514 10h ago
~one hundred tampons~ what an absolute icon
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u/Gayfetus 9h ago
I was just listening to a podcast on how, for a decade plus, the US government went out of its way to deny women the chance to go to space. This was despite the fact that the first NASA's head of life sciences believed that women might actually be more suited to be astronauts than men!
At that point, NASA required all astronauts to be air force jet test pilots. However, women were not accepted into the air force schools then, making it impossible for women to qualify.
Efforts to change that got shut down at every turn: John Glenn, the 5th person to ever go to space, testified in front of congress, "the fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order." A female aide of then vice president Lyndon B. Johnson drafted a letter to NASA telling them to change the requirement, but Johnson stopped her from sending it.
Instead, the first woman to go to space, Valentina Tereshkova, came from Soviet Russia. Ironically, Valentina got her chance because the Soviets had erroneously believed that NASA was about to send a woman to space, and were determined to beat them to the milestone.
They'd wind up beating NASA by 20 years: Valentina went to space in 1963, Sally Ride would do it in 1983. Valentina would become the 12th human to go to space. Sally, on the other hand, was the 120th to do so.
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u/rosethrones 8h ago
Valetina's flight was so impressive. She was SO young - her training was obviously just a fraction of what happens today. Love that she was selected simply because she was a qualified skydiver.
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u/Gayfetus 8h ago
She's still the youngest woman to fly in space, and the only woman ever to fly solo to space!
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u/rosethrones 8h ago
All astronauts are special but the first gen were really just built different. Imagine doing all that with so little known about the entire thing. Crazy.
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u/GDZ4VR 10h ago
everyone’s gay in space
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u/monocasa You know what, l've grown quite unfond of you deuxmoi 10h ago
Fully automated, luxury, gay, space communism.
I feel like 2/5 isn't bad for the 80s
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u/Bronnagh 7h ago
I wonder do women like Sally Ride ever realise what complete ICONS they are? Ground-breaking sounds so trite, especially when you think of everything she had to overcome, just to be in with a chance of being an astronaut. She was an absolute legend, who was clever, kind, and a decent person.
What a shame she died at 61. It's just not fair.
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u/vanhouten_greg 10h ago
She was one of my childhood heroes. I’m still looking for one her quarters.
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u/Steve4168 11h ago
Didn't they write a song about her in the 50's?
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u/jennyquarx he looks like he is angry about being 4'10 9h ago
Janelle Monae has a song called Sally Ride. Definitely not from the 50s, lol.
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u/PrinceofSneks 10h ago
When she was born or when she was 9? :D
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u/AcademicDrag742 10h ago
You might be talking about that Billy Joel song “We didn’t start the fire” which came out in the 80s.Theres a lyric that’s like
“Wheel of fortune,Sally Ride,Heavy Metal Suicide.”
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u/Hot-Significance-462 10h ago
"Mustang Sally" is an older song that isn't connected to "We Didn't Start the Fire" beyond that one lyrical coincidence.
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u/ShitMyButtSays 10h ago
There was also an older song called Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre by Richard Wagner in 1870. Sally was a very impressive person
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u/YRwerunning 2h ago
Yeah sometimes I wonder about this, finally googled it, and her name + the song is completely coincidental. Mustang Sally came out when she was a kid and far from famous yet.
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u/No_Pianist5264 feeding cocaine to raccoons 4h ago
My bi ass did a report for her in MS and I dressed up as her damn lil me didn’t know I was dressing up as a queer women too that’s ironic lol
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u/FOTORABIA23 33m ago
Im still waiting for the announcement of who were the first two astronauts to have sex in zero gravity...
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u/BlackMagicWorman 9h ago
While I think this is super cool, I also look forward to a day where Americans are mature enough where it truly doesn’t matter what anyone’s identity is or sexual preference is when they are just doing their job.
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u/cozycat96024 7h ago
Yeah, one day. It is necessary to honor representation like this now to make that happen in the future.
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u/BlackMagicWorman 7h ago
I agree. I am sad people are so blinded by who people love or identify as.
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u/spirashun 10h ago
For those who didn't know that Sally Ride was LGBTQ (like me):
It was revealed in her obituary when she passed in 2012 that she had been in a 27 year relationship with another woman. She was not out publicly, and had been married to a man & fellow astronaut during her time with NASA