Rocket joyride astronomical vanity trip

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/04/2025 (202 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Earlier this week, journalist, aviation businesswoman, philanthropist and children’s book author Lauren Sánchez took a little joyride to space in a rocket owned by her fiancé, Jeff Bezos, and his private spaceflight startup Blue Origin.

She was joined by some high-profile besties: pop star Katy Perry, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe.

The women boarded the rocket in tiny designer spacesuits, with full faces of makeup and beautifully blown-out hair. It’s good to know that beauty standards are truly inescapable. My god, can’t a woman leave Earth for 11 minutes without “putting on her face”?

The emphasis on looking hot in space — or “putting the ass in astronaut,” to quote Perry — wasn’t the only cringe feature of the Blue Origin trip, heavily promoted in the weeks leading up to it as the first all-woman spaceflight since Soviet Union cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova made history in 1963 as the first woman in space. I mean, Tereshkova is an engineer who spent days up there and these women were on a self-piloted spacecraft for funsies, but whatever! Support women!

The first American woman (and third woman ever) to fly in space, meanwhile, was Sally Ride, an astronaut and physicist who was famously asked by NASA engineers, in anticipation of her history-making flight in 1983, if 100 tampons was the right number of tampons to take to space for six days. (It is not.)

Despite its framing as some kind of giant leap for womankind, the Blue Origin flight was not in the name of science or research — though I’m sure having Nguyen, who studied at NASA, and Bowe, who worked at NASA, could lend some credibility to the idea that this trip was about inspiring the next generation of women in STEM.

No, this trip was a glossy ad for private space tourism — a tacky stunt whose only message is that proximity to wealth gives you access to rarefied opportunities, which, duh. You don’t have to study hard and become a scientist or engineer to get to space, girls. You just have to be rich — and surround yourself with people who are even richer.

The women went up, the women went down, Katy Perry kissed the ground. The only relatable thing about this trip was King’s grim face boarding the shuttle because that’s exactly how I look gearing up to take my place at 27D on a midnight flight back to Winnipeg.

I struggle with the idea that a vanity trip to space that will be out of reach for 99 per cent of people is somehow empowering when, meanwhile back on Earth, scientific institutions are being gutted and reproductive rights are being threatened. It seems especially hollow to be taking an empowHERment girls’ trip to space at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed massive cuts to NASA.

Luckily, it doesn’t seem as if people are buying what Sánchez and her crew of girlbosses are selling: as far as publicity stunts go, this one was a bigger flop than Katy Perry’s last album.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com