Yes, Sally Ride was the first known LGBTQ+ NASA astronaut

Every June, the LGBTQ+ community celebrates and acknowledges its history and LGBTQ+ people and their accomplishments today.

Some people have included Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, as part of that celebration. Last year, a viral tweet claimed Ride was a lesbian in response to a video clip in which right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro mocked the idea of “lesbians on the moon.”

THE QUESTION

Was Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, also NASA’s first LGBTQ+ astronaut?

THE SOURCES

• NASA
• Sally Ride Science
• National Women’s History Museum
• Sally Ride’s obituary
• Article by Tam O’Shaughnessy, Ride’s partner, in HuffPost

THE ANSWER

Yes, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, also holds the distinction of NASA’s first known gay astronaut.

WHAT WE FOUND

Sally Ride joined four male crewmates on Challenger's STS-7 mission in 1983, making her the first American woman in space, NASA says. At the time, she was also the youngest American in space, the National Women’s History Museum says.

When Ride first entered space, she was in a relationship with fellow astronaut Steve Hawley, whom she married in 1982. But they divorced in 1987 and Ride entered a relationship with Tam O'Shaughnessy. Their relationship didn’t become public until after Ride’s death. 

“They met as children while competing in tennis competitions, remained close friends, and the friendship blossomed into love,” the National Women’s History Museum said.

Ride retired from NASA in 1987, and accepted a position as a professor of physics at University of California San Diego in 1989. Ride and O’Shaughnessy moved out to San Diego, and lived there together as partners until Ride’s death in 2012, says Sally Ride Science, the organization Ride founded as a company.

Ride and O'Shaughnessy, along with three colleagues, founded Sally Ride Science in 2001 as a science education company. When Ride died after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, O’Shaughnessy wrote Ride’s obituary for the company’s website.

The obituary said Ride was survived by “Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years,” revealing their relationship to the public for the first time.

The couple did not hide their relationship from their family and close friends, O’Shaughnessy wrote for HuffPost in 2017. But they consciously chose not to make their relationship public while Ride was alive.

“Once we started our own company in 2000, we made the conscious decision not to be public about our relationship,” O’Shaughnessy said. “The reason was simple: our company depended on corporate sponsorships, and back then we didn’t have confidence corporate leaders would support us if they knew we were a couple.”

But once Ride was diagnosed with cancer in March 2011, that changed. The pair became more publicly open about being a gay couple. “We no longer worried about the impact on our company,” O’Shaughnessy said.

“Sally and I wanted to be as connected as possible,” O’Shaughnessy said. “We became Certified Domestic Partners in California. We introduced each other by saying, ‘She’s my partner.’ We became publically [sic] affectionate.”

In 2013, then-President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Ride the Presidential Medal of Freedom. According to O’Shaughnessy, Obama decided she should accept the award on Ride’s behalf. That made O’Shaughnessy, as well as Walter Naegle, the partner of the late civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, the first people to accept the honor on behalf of their same-sex partners, according to O’Shaughnessy.

After Ride became the first American woman, first LGBTQ+ astronaut and youngest American in space, Ride returned to space in 1984 as part of a crew that included another woman, Kathryn Sullivan, and five male crewmates, Sally Ride Science says. Ride was training for a third mission before the 1986 Challenger disaster temporarily grounded all spaceflights.

Ride served on the investigative panel for the Challenger disaster, and was later on the investigative panel for the Columbia disaster in 2003. She is the only person to have been a part of both panels, according to Sally Ride Science.

Two other NASA astronauts, both women, have been revealed to be gay since Ride’s death: Wendy Lawrence and Anne McClain.