TRAILBLAZER DEPT.SPACE ODYSSEY

The other day, amid throngs of schoolkids, a septuagenarian woman with a puff of gray hair, in a black turtleneck and pearl earrings, stepped into the Rose Center for Earth and Space.

-  —Michael Schulman

“I remember coming here in the early nineties,” the woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy, said. “When we came, no one recognized Sally. It was perfect for her. We were just two citizens.” Sally was Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman in space. O’Shaughnessy was her partner of twenty-seven years, a fact that became public only when Ride died, in 2012, and O’Shaughnessy wrote herself into the obituary.

O'Shaughnessy tells the full story of their relationship in a National Geographic documentary, “Sally,” which is due out next week. “She was a pretty hard-core introvert,” O'Shaughnessy said. “I'm an introvert, but I think I like people more than Sally did.” She stood on a walkway surrounding the planetarium sphere. She and Ride met when they were twelve and thirteen, respectively, at a tennis tournament in Redlands, California. “We were standing in line, and I noticed this young girl ahead of me,” she recalled. “When the line started moving forward, she suddenly rose up on her toes and walked on her toes a few steps. It just cracked me up. I thought it was the funniest, quirkiest thing I'd ever seen.”