An all-female crew went briefly to space for an 11-minute flight on Monday. The criticism that followed has lasted much longer.
Pop star Katy Perry, author and former journalist Lauren Sanchez, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyễn, film producer Kerianne Flynn and CBS host Gayle King were on Blue Origin’s successful NS-31 flight this week.
The crew rolled to the launchpad in Rivian electric trucks and took an elevator up to board the crew capsule. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, Sanchez’s fiancé, personally escorted them to the rocket. The flight lasted about 11 minutes. Perry sang What a Wonderful World during the flight, although choppy audio made it difficult to hear the women at times during the livestream.
This was the first all-female spaceflight since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s historic solo spaceflight in 1963. Tereshkova was the first woman in space.
Bezos was waiting to greet the crew at the landing site and apparently stepped in a small hole and fell, almost landing on his face. Social media replayed the moment over and over.
Wrote one X user, “Excuse me while I watch Jeff Bezos faceplant a million times.”
Criticism — and defense — of flight
The criticism began even before the women took off. On the Today show on April 3, actor Olivia Munn dissed the event.
“There are so many other things that are so important in the world right now,” Munn said on the show. “What’s the point? Is it historic that you guys are going on a ride? I think it’s a bit gluttonous.”
For some reason, fast-food chain Wendy’s, known for its witty tweets, took aim at Perry after she landed. First, Wendy’s tweeted, “Can we send her back?”
The company also tweeted a photo of Perry kissing the ground after returning to Earth and captioned it “I kissed the ground and i liked it.” (Perry’s 2008 song I Kissed a Girl contained the line “I kissed a girl and I liked it.”)
Then, when another X user asked, “She was only up there for like 10mins, right?” the Wendy’s account responded snarkily with, “don’t short change her it was 11 minutes.”
But the women defended their flight.
“I’m not going to let you steal our joy, but most people are really excited and cheering us on and realize what this mission means to young women, young girls and boys too,” King said in a press conference after the return.
And Bowe, the aerospace engineer, defended the scientific part of the trip.
“We advanced science today,” Bowe said. “More people are going to be able to do meaningful research with Blue Origin because we collected data. And it wasn’t just plant biology — we studied human physiology, we contributed to the knowledge base of what people know about women. … We are inspiring the world right now.”
Watch Katy Perry visit space
The New Shepard spacecraft launched from West Texas at about 8:30 a.m. CT on Monday. Relive the mission through Blue Origin’s livestream replay on YouTube.
Watch this: Watch Blue Origin Successfully Land Its First All-Female Star-Studded Spaceflight
Does New Shepard reach space?
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Blue Origin’s New Shepard launches from Texas.
There’s an ongoing debate about what represents space. For example, everyone agrees the International Space Station is in space, but commercial rocket rides like what Blue Origin operates fall into a gray zone. One benchmark is the Karman line, an imaginary line 62 miles above the Earth’s surface.
NASA recognizes that “there’s really no clear boundary between where Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins” but says most scientists recognize the Karman line as the transition point to space. So unless you want to get into a nitpicky argument, Perry and the others made a brief visit to space during their flight.
The women experienced weightlessness after the spacecraft passed the Karman line. The return trip involved a gentle parachute-assisted landing of the capsule.
This was the 11th human flight for the New Shepard program. Blue Origin had previously flown 52 people into space, including Star Trek’s William Shatner, Good Morning America host Michael Strahan and Bezos.
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