Empowerment? Or just a hollow word?
When Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova spent three days in space, way back in 1963, all alone up there on a solo mission, she was the first woman in space. Since then, over a hundred women have been on such voyages, but the first all-woman space flight since Tereshkova's took place only this month. On April 14, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin launched six women beyond the Kármán line, in a New Shepard rocket. They flew for eleven minutes in a historical event that was more stunt than space flight. All were public figures: activist Amanda Nguyen, popstar Katy Perry, producer Kerianne Flynn, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe and journalists Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez (who happens to be Bezos' fiancée). The launch was hyped as being about women's empowerment — a claim that has been laughed down by many. Thankfully, 'giant leaps for womankind', to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, have occurred since Tereshkova's sojourn, and we aren't impressed.
Perry has taken the most flak for her participation in this event, and has since said that she regrets some of her performativeness around it. On the other hand, Amanda Nguyen's presence isn't highlighted at all. Nguyen's remarkable story involves having put her astronaut dreams on hold years ago in order to devote herself to working for the rights of sexual assault survivors. For her, the experience is not a bored-billionaire-bucket-list one; it's a deferred dream come true.
That said, the thing with a reductive stunt like this is that it makes commentators also make reductive observations. The truth is that the vast majority of human beings are probably medically or otherwise unfit to be launched into space, and we are going to behave in silly ways if we get the chance to — even if a suborbital joyride is all we'll take. Astronauts including Buzz Aldrin had long predicted the rise of space tourism, and it's happening now. It is, of course, restricted to the uber-wealthy.
Whether or not space tourism should become accessible to everyone isn't the concern. As for the women's empowerment façade: it's mildly surprising that this tokenistic Blue Origin trip wasn't timed for International Women's Day alongside unveilings of pink-branded ventures, pink dress codes, pink record-setting floral displays, and pink debit cards to use on pink discounts galore. No: the most egregious thing about this event is the carbon footprint and to an arguably lesser extent, the financial cost.
That the money involved in this undertaking could have gone to philanthropical causes is obvious to all who have righteous judgment about hyper-privileged expenditure. It's the timing of it — that it happened during a genocide-induced famine in Gaza and a clampdown on civil rights in America — that feels especially distasteful.
The timing of it also includes ongoing climate apocalypse. We — all living beings of Earth — cannot escape this burning planet, not even for 11 broadcast minutes. Blue Origin claims that its New Shepard rockets have zero carbon emissions. Even if that's true, they definitely emit nitrogen oxide and water vapour. The environmental cost of space exploration for science can be ethically justified, but shooting celebrities into space for fun and profit simply cannot be.
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