On April 14th, the Blue Origin NS-31 flight, which lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds from lift-off to landing, brought six women, Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sánchez, Kerianne Flynn, Aisha Bowe, and Amanda Nguyen, into space. A popstar, a broadcast journalist, Jeff Bezos’ wife, a film producer, an aerospace engineer, and a sexual violence activist and survivor who has always had a dream to become an astronaut, respectively. The NS-31 flight was the very first all-female spaceflight since 1963, but contrary to what you might think because of this, I believe that the flight was a setback for feminism and our society as a whole.
The intention of the all-female crew was to encourage women and young girls to become interested in careers related to space travel and STEM, which is an admirable pursuit. That is, it would be if Katy Perry’s presence on the flight didn’t completely overshadow every good thing that was accomplished. You can’t exactly put Katy Perry in space and expect anyone to focus on anything other than that.
This disregard for Amanda Nguyen and her admirable story is the first offense. She is a Harvard graduate who studied astrophysics and was on the path to becoming an astronaut. However, three months before graduating, she was raped, which caused her to discover that all rape evidence kits in Massachusetts would be destroyed after just six months despite the statute of limitations for prosecuting rape being 15 years. After this happened, she dedicated her life to advocating for sexual violence survivors. She founded the Rise Now nonprofit, which aims to bring equality to sexual violence survivors around the world and has so far successfully passed 91 laws, including the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, which Amanda Nguyen drafted herself. This bill included the right to have your rape kit preserved until the end of the statute of limitations.
Amanda Nguyen is an extraordinary role model who had to put her dreams on hold to advocate for those who have no voice, and she deserved to be on that flight in every way. Her resilience and drive to achieve what she had been chasing for so long, even with all of the setbacks that she had to endure, are qualities that not many of us could claim to possess at the magnitude that she possesses them. Not only that, but she made history, becoming the very first Vietnamese woman to go to space through the Blue Origin flight. She should have been the focus of the whole ordeal, not a celebrity who paid her way onto the flight for frivolous reasons.
Katy Perry, Gayle King, Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez never should have been on that spaceship. Their presence completely transformed the flight from an inspirational mission to nothing more than a laughing stock of the media. They could have highlighted the strength of sexual violence survivors with Amanda Nguyen and female aerospace engineers with Aisha Bowe, but they didn’t, choosing instead to turn it into yet another superficial celebrity PR stunt with questionable consequences.
This does not help women prove that their contributions to society are worthwhile. It does the exact opposite, furthering the extremely harmful narrative that anything a woman does is for purely fatuous reasons, and that the importance of our endeavors pales in comparison to those of men. In my personal opinion, the Blue Origin flight was never really about female empowerment. If it were, they would have tried a lot harder to make it mean something, instead of just throwing a few celebrities on a flight with people who actually deserved to be there and calling it feminism.
Put women who have studied STEM and who have actually worked hard to get to where they are in space, and keep the millionaires far away. It is the only way to effectively encourage the future generation of women to pursue STEM careers. We want to see people we relate to accomplishing incredible things, and that includes women who have survived sexual violence. It notably does not include Katy Perry, because the vast majority of us are nowhere near a net worth of $350 million. Regular, everyday people desperately need to be shown that their dreams are valid and achievable, so it is in our best interest to shift the spotlight off out-of-touch celebrities and onto people who have built themselves from the ground up.
The celebrity status of the majority of the flight’s crew was not the only way in which it fell short. Perhaps the most infamous moment was Katy Perry kissing the ground upon landing and making comments about “protecting our mother,” referring to the earth. The irony of this situation is laughable, considering the flight itself is estimated to have released 330 tons of carbon dioxide, and the fact that Blue Origin is owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns Amazon, a company that has been heavily criticized for unsustainable practices and greenwashing. In the current climate state of the planet, everyone simply needs to be more aware of the effect their actions have on the environment, especially those with such a large platform.
In almost every aspect, the Blue Origin flight ended up being an absolute dumpster fire. Even so, the principles of the flight had so much potential. They could’ve done something influential if they put more people like Amanda Nguyen and Aisha Bowe on the flight, and could’ve assigned more pride to the first all-female space crew in over 60 years. I sincerely hope that the glaring mistakes made with Blue Origin NS-31 can be learned from, and that future attempts at similar kinds of space exploration are drastically improved. The foundation was there, it just needed a different construction crew.
