Next Monday, on April 14, an all-women, celebrity-laden crew will launch into space on a Blue Origin rocket.
It’s part of a new age of exploration, where venturing to the bottom of the sea and up into space have become tourism projects for billionaires, such as Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The difference is that this one is being pinkwashed with the language of feminism and the struggles of women in STEM.
The unofficial leader of this trip around the edge of the Earth is Lauren Sánchez, former TV journalist and fiancée of Amazon magnate Bezos, fresh off their attendance at Donald Trump’s inauguration and ahead of their lavish wedding set to take over Venice in June. Singer Katy Perry and “CBS Mornings” host Gayle King (perhaps best known as Oprah’s bestie) bring the star power.
Rounding out the crew is former NASA rocket scientist and STEM for girls campaigner Aisha Bowe; bioastronautics researcher and sexual violence advocate Amanda Nguyen; and film producer Kerianne Flynn.
The buzz has been building. Sánchez, Perry and King all attended a red carpet event in L.A. last night called the Breakthrough Prize, known as the “Oscars of Science.” Created by Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin, among other billionaires, it awards budding scientists and mathematicians funding and scholarships.
Perry performed in silver spangled Gaurav Gupta, and Sánchez presented onstage in a vintage John Galliano red slip. A long list of notable guests ranged from Rupert Murdoch to Jessica Chastain, Jeff Koons to Seth Rogen, Gwyneth Paltrow to Bill Gates.
Sánchez said that the group of women she chose to join the Blue Origin trip are storytellers with the power to inspire. “They are going to be up in space and will be able to spread what they felt in different ways,” she said during a cover shoot and interview with Elle magazine.
The article points out that women make up only 11% of people who have been to space; visible minorities are fewer still. Bowe, who is Black, said in the interview that representation matters in encouraging young women of colour to pursue careers in STEM fields. “It’s people seeing themselves and being able to show up authentically in their careers in the future.”
This is true, and noble. The last time a spacecraft went up with only women aboard was in 1963, when Russian astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight also made her the first woman to go to space.
But in this politically and financially stormy spring of 2025, it is troubling that these women are aligning themselves with Bezos, one of the neo-oligarchs newly indulgent of Donald Trump and the Republican agenda. It includes restricting reproductive health care and freedoms for women, as well as the ongoing erasure of women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people from American governmental agencies, historical and current websites and programs.
Perry has publicly been supportive of President Joe Biden and Democratic party nominee Kamala Harris; King backed Harris last year as well. But still, you are who you accept invitations from.
The trip, called NS-31 as it’s the 31st flight of the New Shepard rocket, will last about 11 minutes total. Four of those will be weightless, when the crew can unbuckle and float around, liberated from Earth’s gravity pull. Essentially, it’s a joyride.
When actress Olivia Munn learned about the trip live on TV on “Today with Jenna & Friends,” she reacted by describing it as “gluttonous.”
Munn pointed out the vast cost of space travel while many back on Earth are struggling to afford eggs. (Blue Origin has not made the cost of this trip public, but has sold seats for $1.25 million USD in the past; rival company Virgin Galactic charges $600,000 USD per seat.) “Space exploration was to further our knowledge and to help mankind,” she said. “I mean, what are they gonna do up there that has made it better for us down here?”
When the crew met together for the first time for the Elle cover shoot, they spoke about how they will be going up in full hair and makeup. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Perry said. “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
When she heard about this, Munn again spoke for many of us: “Like, they said this out loud?”
They did. Sánchez spoke about her lash extensions, and Bowe said that she went skydiving in Dubai to test how her hairstyle would stand up to a space mission in front of cameras.
Nguyen added, “I think it’s so important for people to see us like that. This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion.” Women, she said, contain multitudes.
Well, yes. Yes, we do. Grooming and presentation are key aspects of human interaction. And we should be able to wear as much makeup as we want and whatever clothing we want and still be taken seriously.
But in this particular MAGA-mainstreaming moment, overly groomed presentation of womanhood has become somewhat of a political statement. In February, a satirical trend emerged on TikTok that has come to be known as “MAGA Makeup.”
Comedian Suzanne Lambert, who grew up in “a gun-loving Bible-belt town” in Georgia, went viral for her savage lampooning of the identikit MAGA lewk: heavy foundation that gives a tanned effect and stops abruptly at the chin; lashings of too-light undereye concealer; and spiky mascara applied liberally (pun intended). All finished off with frosted lipstick, carefully set hair and form-fitting clothing.
If there is one real-life image that says it best, it would be U.S. Security of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem posing for photographs in front of imprisoned people in El Salvador while decked out in full makeup, bouncy extra-long curls and a $50K USD Rolex.
The apocalypse will look glam.
Perhaps literally, for Sánchez and her crew, if this expedition doesn’t go well. The spectre of the similarly recreational Titan submarine implosion in 2023 is still fresh, just last week two NASA astronauts finally returned to Earth after being unexpectedly stuck in space for nine months.
Suborbital missions are less dangerous than orbital ones, which travel at up to 27,000 kilometres per hour, circling the Earth in outer space, but in 2014 a Virgin Galactic spacecraft (owned by yet another billionaire, Richard Branson) broke apart during a suborbital ride, killing a co-pilot.
This is only Blue Origin’s 11th flight with humans on board. When Bezos himself went to space in 2021, a suborbital trip similar to the one the crew of women will take, CNN explained that the ship reaches about 3,700 km an hour (three times the speed of sound), flying vertically to hit the 100 km point known as the Kármán line, which marks the beginning of “outer space.” Then, the crew capsule separates from the rocket and hovers in space (the weightless part), before getting pulled down by gravity, its descent slowed by a system of parachutes. The rocket comes back down separately on autopilot.
“Is it historic?” Munn asked of the expedition, rhetorically. Actually, it is. Much of the action in the American space program is now in the private sector, but this trip represents a splashy new frontier in pointless, ultraexpensive space tourism, putting female celebrities and influencers front and centre. It’s a gimmick, but in a time when life imitates parody more every day, it’s a fitting one.
