Last Monday, six women boarded a Blue Origin rocket and went into space for approximately eleven minutes. The crew included pop star Katy Perry, Jeff Bezos’ (the C.E.O of Amazon and founder/owner of Blue Origin) fiance Lauren Sanchez, CBS host Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, filmmaker Kerianne Fletcher, and scientist and advocate Amanda Nguyen.
Although Nguyen and Bowe were the only people qualified to go on the trip, they were overshadowed by Perry and Sanchez’s comments and attitudes toward the experience. They made the trip out to be a spectacle, – which to be fair, it was – and turned this opportunity into something shallow. Perry said in an interview before the launch that she would, “put the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” while Sanchez noted how they were going to wear eyelash extensions in space. Not only is this entirely dystopian and tone-deaf, but it just pushes misogynistic stereotypes when this was supposed to be a historical accomplishment. Women’s contributions in the STEM field have been silenced for centuries, oftentimes with men taking credit for their work. James Watson and Francis Crick took credit for Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of DNA’s structure in 1953. Katherine Johnson was the mathematician behind the calculations that sent Alan Shephard to space, but reports still credit a man.
Amanda Nguyen, the 2022 TIME Woman of the Year, a woman who got Congress to pass the Sexual Assault Survivor’s Rights Act, who worked tirelessly after her own traumatic experience to get where she is now – is the one who deserved to go to space. Instead, her story was drowned out by the people who used her as a prop to gather support.
After The Blue Origin landed, the backlash came instantly. Katy Perry boasted about being the first pop star to sing in space, whereas Amanda Nguyen brought testing materials to experiment with wound dressing in microgravity. She also mentioned how she wants to conduct more tests involving menstruation in space. “Women were barred from becoming astronauts at NASA early on because of menstruation. They didn’t have the data to back that up,” she explained in an interview with “CBS Mornings.”
Aisha Bowe, who is also the founder and CEO of STEMBoard and LINGO, an educational technology company, is the second out of the six women who actually deserved to be in space. In an Instagram post published on Wednesday, Bowe explained the experiments she conducted during the flight including how certain crops grow in microgravity. But of course, it was more important for news articles to cover Katy Perry singing and the woman engaged to one of the worst capitalists this world has ever seen’s opinion on how “flattering” their space suits were.
What could have been an empowering and inspiring moment in history was turned into something that affirms the dystopian state of this country. The rich elite will pretend to care about the public, but will flaunt their wealth and take attention away from issues that matter. The billions of dollars and tons of carbon emissions used to make this trip could have been put to better use if more women like Amanda Nguyen and Aisha Bowe were on board. Hopefully, they will get the opportunity to continue their space research and make a positive difference there, like they did on Earth.