Kristen Stewart To Play Astronaut Sally Ride In Limited Series THE CHALLENGER

Kristen Stewart will be making her television debut in "The Challenger", a limited series that tells the story of astronaut and physicist Sally Ride, who became the first American woman to fly in space as part of a NASA space shuttle astronaut class of 1978 that was the first to be diversified and not comprised of all white men.

The series is based on "The New Guys" a book written by Meredith E. Bagby The project was developed by Kyra Sedgwick's Big Swing Productions and brought to Amblin. Sedgwick will executive alongside Steven Spielberg and Stewart. Amblin's Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey are also executive producers.

Bagby tells the story of a group that was called by their predecessors "The F*cking New Guys", as NASA sought to diversify its pilots and crew for the space shuttle program. Ride was the first woman and the first member of the LGBTQ+ community to fly into space. Also in that program was the first Black and Asian American astronauts, and a married couple. They passed all the rigorous tests to become top of the class, and egos, ambition and romance were part of the cultural clash. They were also quite brilliant.

In 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly on the space shuttle, and became an instant celebrity. That joy was short-lived, however, when three years later the space shuttle Challenger blew apart 73 seconds into its ascent on January 28, 1986, killing all seven members of the crew. Ride then became the only astronaut to become part of the Rogers Commission, a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, and it later came out that she pinpointed the problems with O-rings that became stiff at low temperature, and that turned out to be the reason for the explosion. Ride died from cancer at age 61 in 2012, a true American hero.

The hope will be to get this ready to time the series in proximity of the Challenger disaster anniversary.

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