Kristen Stewart is going to space.
The Challenger TV series has cast Kristen Stewart to play the role of Sally Ride, an astronaut.
The limited TV series is 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.
Amazon/MGM studios is bagging a deal to release the series, according to Deadline.
The first female astronaut from the United States, Ride was a member of the groundbreaking NASA space shuttle class of 1978, which broke through gender stereotypes by including women.
The class also included the first Asian and Black American astronauts.
Ride participated in two shuttle missions and was NASA’s first LGBTQIA+ astronaut.
Soon, she became the only astronaut on the Rogers Commission, the presidential commission brought together to investigate the 1986 Challenger disaster.
She passed away at the age of 61 in 2012 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 after her death.
“The focus is this newly recruited wild, feral group of astronauts who were all very diverse,” Kyra Sedgwick, who is producing along with Valerie Stadler through Big Swing Productions, 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.”
