Kristen Stewart will play Sally Ride in The Challenger, a limited TV series based on Meredith Bagby’s 2022 book, The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel.
Deadline reports that Amazon/MGM studios is closing in on a deal to land the series.
Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, was part of the barrier-breaking 1978 NASA space shuttle class — the first not to be composed entirely of white men. The class also included the first Black and Asian American astronauts.
Ride was part of two shuttle missions and was NASA’s first LGBTQIA+ astronaut. She later became the only astronaut on the Rogers Commission, the presidential commission assembled to investigate the 1986 Challenger disaster.
She died in 2012 at age 61 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Kyra Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler’s Big Swing Productions developed the series, which will be produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners and Stewart’s production company, Nevermind. Maggie Cohn, whose credits include American Crime Story, The Staircase and Narcos: Mexico, will be the writer and showrunner.
“The focus is this newly recruited wild, feral group of astronauts who were all very diverse,” Sedgwick said in a statement to Deadline. “And then on an Oppenheimer track, it also tells the story of the Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger disaster that Ride took part in. Growing up in Florida, Meredith Bagby was obsessed with space and the shuttle, and she also watched the Challenger explode. Meredith got hundreds of hours of interviews with the members of that class, and we have relationships with all those living astronauts and they will be part of our brain trust on the show.”
The Challenger will mark the television debut for Stewart, 34.
“Valerie had this dream of having Kristen Stewart, and after more than a year of trying to get Kristen this book through back channeling, she read it and she fell in love,” Sedgwick continued. “Getting Kristen and Maggie was incredible, for a company nobody really knows yet. We are three girls with a dream.”
The hope is that the show will be ready to debut around the time of the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, which happened on January 28, 1986. Ride was the one who determined that Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight due to the shuttle’s o-rings becoming stiff in the colder-than-normal Florida temperature.
