The space wars are heating up. On Monday, an all-women crew aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft travelled 100 km above Earth, breached the Karman line, “saw the Moon”, and experienced weightlessness briefly. The celebrities on board were, in no particular order: Singer-songwriter Katy Perry, news presenter Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, scientist Amanda Nguyen and philanthropist Lauren Sanchez, Bezos’s fiancée.
Apparently, the all-women-squad idea came to Sanchez hours after Bezos returned from his own space jaunt in 2021. With the billionaire’s green signal, four years later, the mission — marketed as a giant leap for womankind — took off for all of 11 minutes. With six capes and a CGI budget, the superhero movie could have written itself. Only, this wasn’t quite the feminist triumph it’s being made out to be. For one, this is not the first all-women crew travelling to space — Valentina Tereshkova’s solo mission in 1963 holds that title. Second, ultimately, this is a battle for space between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin — and so far, Musk has the undisputed lead. The “glamour” — “Space is going to finally be glam,” Perry remarked — seems to be serving the same function that many other women-forward projects in the public eye do: A lip-service-heavy grab for profits. Empowerment, moreover, comes at a steep cost: The first ticket for Bezos’s rocket was auctioned at $28 million.
Of course, star power can be a powerful ambassador for science. But whether this joyride amounts to a meaningful feminist victory is quite another matter. After all, six more stars lighting up the sky can mean only so much to those grounded on Earth.
