One Giant Stunt for Womankind

New York Times

14-04-2025

This morning, Jeff Bezos' private spaceflight startup, Blue Origin, launched six well-known women into space. The company documented the event with a livestream hosted by the sportscaster Charissa Thompson. The celebrities Kris Jenner, Orlando Bloom and Oprah Winfrey watched from the ground. Bezos himself escorted the crew to the capsule. As the rocket blasted into the sky, live audio from inside the ship was broadcast down to Earth. One of the occupants could be heard screaming: 'Oh my goddess!'
Bezos has said that it's his generation's job to 'build a road to space, so that future generations can unleash their creativity.' Now he has made his spaceship into the world's most extravagant influencer platform. The flight's roster seems to have been assembled with the energy of an American Girl doll collection, with seats awarded to women with different claims to fame and relevance. There was the pop star Katy Perry, the journalist Gayle King, the aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, the feminist activist Amanda Nguyen, the film producer Kerianne Flynn and Lauren Sánchez — the television journalist, aviation businesswoman, philanthropist and children's book author who is engaged to marry Bezos.
Bezos' company has promoted this as the 'first all-woman spaceflight' since the Soviet Union cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she made a solo trip to the Earth's orbit in 1963. Tereshkova spent three days in space, circled the Earth 48 times and landed an international celebrity and feminist icon. The Blue Origin flight attempted to reverse-engineer that historic moment: By taking established celebrities and activists and launching them into space, it applied a feminist sheen to Blue Origin and made its activities feel socially relevant by association.
Blue Origin pitched the flight as a gambit to encourage girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers and to, as Sánchez put it in an Elle cover story on the trip, inspire 'the next generation of explorers.' But the flight was recreational, and its passengers are not space professionals but space tourists. Their central mission was to experience weightlessness, view the Earth from above, and livestream it. They are like payload specialists with a specialty in marketing private rockets. If the flight proves anything, it is that women are now free to enjoy capitalism's most decadent spoils alongside the world's wealthiest men.
Though women remain severely underrepresented in the aerospace field worldwide, they do regularly escape the Earth's atmosphere. More than 100 have gone to space since Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so in 1983. If an all-women spaceflight were chartered by, say, NASA, it might represent the culmination of many decades of serious investment in female astronauts. (In 2019, NASA was embarrassingly forced to scuttle an all-women spacewalk when it realized it did not have enough suits that fit them.) An all-women Blue Origin spaceflight signifies only that several women have amassed the social capital to be friends with Lauren Sánchez.
Blue Origin is one of several private spaceflight companies — among them Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures and SpaceX — now offering rich people and their friends access to space. Its New Shepard rocket is self-piloting, and the six women had no technical duties on the flight. Though two participants had some aerospace experience (Bowe worked for NASA, and Nyugen interned there), Sánchez has said she picked them all because they are 'storytellers' who could step off the flight and promote their experiences through journalism, film and song. To Blue Origin, their value lies expressly in their amateurism. Kristin Fisher, a journalist and the daughter of the NASA astronaut Anna Lee Fisher, who joined the livestream, called the flight's roster 'so refreshing.' In the early days of human spaceflight, astronauts 'were all white male military test pilots, and they had to have 'the right stuff.' You could never talk about nerves, or being nervous, or your feelings,' Fisher said. 'But now, in 2025, it is the right stuff.'
Sánchez arranged for her favorite fashion designers to craft the mission's suits, leveraging it into yet another branding opportunity. Souvenirs of the flight sold on Blue Origin's website feature a kind of yassified shuttle patch design. It includes a shooting-star microphone representing King, an exploding firework representing Perry and a fly representing Sánchez's 2024 children's book about the adventures of a dyslexic insect. Each woman was encouraged to use her four minutes of weightlessness to practice a different in-flight activity tailored to her interests. Nguyen planned to use them to conduct two vanishingly brief science experiments, one of them related to menstruation, while Perry pledged to 'put the 'ass' in astronaut.'
The message is that a little girl can grow up to be whatever she wishes: a rocket scientist or a pop star, a television journalist or a billionaire's fiancée who is empowered to pursue her various ambitions and whims in the face of tremendous costs. In each case, she stands to win a free trip to space. She can have it all, including a family back on Earth. 'Guess what?' Sánchez told Elle. 'Moms go to space.' (Fisher, the first mother in space, went there in 1984.)
The whole thing reminds me of the advice Sheryl Sandberg passed on to women in 'Lean In,' her memoir of scaling the corporate ladder in the technology industry. When Eric Schmidt, then the chief executive of Google, offered Sandberg a position that did not align with her own professional goals, he told her: 'If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.' It is the proximity to power that matters, not the goal of the mission itself.
As Blue Origin loudly celebrates women as consumers of private space travel, it has elided the experiences of professional female astronauts — including the little details that humanized their own flights. Elle suggested that the Blue Origin flight 'will be the first time anybody went to space with their hair and makeup done.' As Perry put it, 'Space is going to finally be glam.' But in fact, female astronauts have long brought their beauty work into space with them. Life magazine published an image of Tereshkova at the hairdresser, explaining that she was 'primping for orbit.' The astronaut Rhea Seddon, who first flew to space in 1985, took NASA-tested cosmetics onboard, knowing that she would be heavily photographed and the images widely circulated.
Though sending women to space has largely been framed as a project for inspiring other women, it stokes certain male fantasies too. Life described Tereshkova's mission this way: 'A blue-eyed blonde with a new hairdo stars in a Russian space spectacular.' Senator Kenneth Keating of New York said she was 'carrying romance to a new high.' Robert Voas, who served as a NASA astronaut-training officer in the 1960s, put it this way: 'I think we all look forward to the time when women will be a part of our spaceflight team, for when this time arrives, it will mean that man will have really found a home in space — for the woman is the personification of the home.'
Blue Origin's vision is that 'millions of people will live and work in space with a single-minded purpose: to restore and sustain Earth, our blue origin.' This spaceflight feels like a training mission for the billionaire fantasy of escaping Earth's smoldering husk. In order to fulfill that dream, women will need to get onboard. The private aerospace industry's largely male clientele may not wish to bro down forever on Mars. They will desire moms to go to space with them, and fiancées too.