Kristen Stewart of the gay film Twilight will star in the upcoming limited series The Challenger, playing a new romantic interest to shake up Tashi, Art, and Patrick’s three-way — wait, apologies to our viewers, we’re hearing reports that her new show is not a sequel to Luca Guadagnino’s tennis rom-com, Challengers. In actuality, Stewart will make her television debut as the astronaut Sally Ride, a pioneering physicist who became the first American woman to fly in space, per Deadline. The series is based on Meredith E. Bagby’s book The New Guys, which traces the history of NASA’s 1978 class, the first to include women and people of color. Three years after her first space flight in 1983, things took a tragic turn when Ride became the only astronaut appointed to the Rogers Commission to investigate the deadly Challenger explosion.
As for its TV adaptation, Kyra Sedgwick developed the project and will executive-produce alongside Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners and Kristen Stewart’s own company, Nevermind. Maggie Cohn (The Staircase and Narcos: Mexico) is locked in as writer and showrunner for the series, aiming to be completed in time for the 50th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy in 2026. In the meantime, it’s not too late for the aforementioned Challengers sequel …