What happened
Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, sent six well-known women into lower orbit Monday, billing the 11-minute journey as the “first all-woman spaceflight” since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 three-day solo mission in space. The six passengers included pop star Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King and Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, who handpicked the roster.
Who said what
On NBC’s “Today With Jenna and Friends,” actress Olivia Munn called the fully automated celebrity space tourism flight “gluttonous” and extravagant, especially when a lot of people “can’t even afford eggs.” Blue Origin “declined to say how much the flight cost or who paid what,” The Associated Press said.
“The cynical part of me wants to call it a marketing stunt,” Dr. Tanya Harrison of the Outer Space Institute told the BBC. But a high-profile all-women team might “change the demographics a little bit of who might want to do something like this.” Taking female celebrities and activists to space “applied a feminist sheen” on the endeavor, Amanda Hess said at The New York Times, but “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.”
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What next?
“In this exciting new era of commercial spaceflight, the dream of becoming an astronaut is no longer limited to a select few,” bitcoin investor Chun Wang, who bankrolled an entire SpaceX flight over the north and south poles, said on X last week. Bezos and Sanchez are scheduled to get married in Venice in two months.