Well, I watched every second of the buildup, flight and aftermath of the first Blue Origin all-female space trip. You’ve heard of one small step for man? This was one giant leap backwards for womankind. I’m kidding, I’m kidding! What could be more empowering or something than watching Lauren Sánchez make going to space sound like brunch with the girrrrrls. Sally Ride could never.

Anyway, if you missed this, Jeff Bezos’s fiancee took an 11-minute trip to the edge of space on one of his Blue Origin craft on Monday, alongside some all-female passengers – sorry, “crew” – who included CBS anchor Gayle King and pop star Katy Perry. So yes: the Woman’s World video is no longer the most plastic feminist thing Katy’s done.

Given the mixture of freebie rides and seats sold to the super-rich, the thing people always say about Blue Origin tickets is that prices range from zero to $28m dollars. A bit like a seat on a RyanAir flight to Tallinn. But these spots were all personally gifted by Bezos and Sánchez because this was an Important Mission. Which also meant the whole thing was exclusively documented by Blue Origin’s Pravda-like web channel. Here, the anchors and reporters kept explaining that – unlike when men went to space in the past – this mission was all about emotions. But look, it’s great that we’re valorising emotions above all things, because it gives me permission to say how very much I hated this entire, hilariously vacuous spectacle.

Lauren already bills herself as a children’s author, helicopter pilot, journalist and philanthropist, and kept being told she was adding “astronaut” to the world’s longest multi-hyphenate. How did she find the trip? “I don’t really have the words for this, like … ?” OK but can you at least try? “I can’t put it into words but I looked out the window and we got to see the moon.”

Back at the viewing platform in the West Texas desert, commentary was provided by, among others, Kris Jenner and a bottom-tier Kardashian (Khloé). Khloé glossed the moment of landing with the words: “it’s literally so hard to explain right now”. Other insights? “There’s one woman whose grandfather is back there and he is 92 and they didn’t even have transportation back then.” I mean, the guy was literally pre-horse. Historic scenes.

Amid extremely stiff competition, the most hardcore gibberish emanated from Perry, who served up an entire word salad bar involving the “feminine divine” and being “super-connected to love”. “It’s about making space for future woman,” she explained. “It’s about taking up space.” Imagine going to actual space and talking instead about therapy-speak “space”. When Buzz Aldrin beheld the surface of the moon, he described it as “magnificent desolation”. Honestly, if he wanted to feel desolation he could have just tuned into this corner of West Texas on Monday afternoon. When a Stem advocate came for her post-flight interview, we got to see the apparently lobotomised reporter shriek: “How do you look perfect after just going to space?!”

In truth, how the women looked had been an overwhelming part of the buildup, and by their own design. In an Elle magazine joint interview with the passengers, Lauren showed off the hot space suits she’d personally commissioned, inquiring rhetorically: “Who would not get glam before the flight?” “Space is going to finally be glam,” agreed Perry. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” A former Nasa rocket scientist said: “I also wanted to test out my hair and make sure that it was OK. So I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good – took it for a dry run.” Still want more? Because there was SO much of it. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!” explained Lauren. “I think it’s so important for people to see us like that,” explained a civil rights activist. “This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion. We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick.”

Ooof. I always thought space travel was futuristic, but this was the first time it came off as travelling back in time, in this case using their little capsule to take us back to the most ludicrous inanities of 2010s girlboss feminism.

Ultimately, it felt like a sign of the times that everything was about personal growth rather than affording any new understanding of wider humanity. As King put it: “I’m so proud of me right now.” Everyone, bar none, talked in whatever trite solipsism language has been reduced to by a permanent diet of social media self-care. It all made me realise how much I miss humans not permanently crying on TV, and being able to find words that don’t sound like they could be printed above a picture of a crossroads sign on Instagram, or maybe some sandy footprints on a beach.

Having oh-my-godded her way through some pure gibberish, Lauren eventually announced that she’d learned: “We’re all in this together. We’re so connected.” Agreed. In which spirit, please please please could Amazon pay full and fair tax in all the territories in which it, one of the world’s biggest companies, operates? Such an act of connection truly would be your and Jeff’s gift to our planet that you apparently just got some kind of a perspective on while Katy Perry was floating around during the zero-gravity bit pushing towards the camera a butterfly printed with her next tour dates. Why do I feel like the most meaningful thing to come out of this will be a three-minute song called Space Cowgirl? Forget the right stuff. This was the wrong stuff.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-female-flight

Lauren Sánchez’s Cosmic Bachelorette Party

The plan for America’s first all-female spaceflight was to look good, have a great time, and do a lot of screaming. And honestly? Mission accomplished.

By Suzy Weiss
04.14.25 — Culture and Ideas

If you don’t know what a bachelorette party is like, let me tell you: It’s like being vacuum sealed in a tin can with a bunch of girls you don’t know that well but with whom you have to pretend to have a life-changing experience, for the sake of the bride, who invited everyone and who has a vision.

In other words, it’s exactly what happened on this morning’s historic American spaceflight.

Just after 9:00 a.m., in West Texas, an all-female space crew lifted off and flew to the Kármán line, which is considered the beginning of outer space, thanks to Jeff Bezos’s private spacefaring company Blue Origin. Ten minutes and 21 seconds after they left the ground, and after a brief hang in zero gravity, the capsule carrying the six women landed back on Earth.

The newly minted astronauts include Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez, pop star Katy Perry, CBS journalist Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. (While Perry was invited to take part in the experience gratis, according to Blue Origin at least some of the seats on the flight were paid for.) The tagline of the trip was “Taking Up Space” (their crew name was The Six Taking Up Space), and the whole thing smelled of a hen party down to the custom flight patch and matching outfits. The women all wore figure-hugging, blue bell-bottomed flight suits, custom-made by the brand Monse, and delivering on Perry’s promise that the six-lady crew would put the “ass” in astronaut.

A few days ago, Perry told the AP that she was doing this to “inspire” the next generation—but watching all the coverage (I couldn’t wait for this trip), it seems like this flight was more like the most publicized, and most expensive, bachelorette party ever rather than a generational watershed.

It’s hard to know where to start. Sometime in the days before the flight, the women were recorded standing with their arms around each other, looking up at the docked rocket, telling it “We love you” and “Bring us back safe,” as though they were talking to an Uber driver charged with getting them to and from a club in Vegas. Perry also inexplicably told the rocket, “Thank you for helping us heal.”

Before they got on the actual spaceship, each woman rang a bell, a Blue Origin tradition, and at this point I wouldn’t have been surprised if Sánchez, the bride-to-be, had donned a cheap veil from Amazon for the festivities. Gayle King looked like she was marching to her own death during this part, while Sánchez could barely keep from bursting into tears when it came to her time to ring it. There are always two kinds of women at a bachelorette party: one, usually the bride, having the absolute time of her life, and the older girl, maybe a cousin, or a future sister-in-law, who is in abject hell, questioning why she even said yes in the first place.

King’s best friend Oprah was hysterically crying when the thing took off, and I felt for her. I myself have told friends to “just say yes” and go on the girls’ trip to Mexico City—only to regret it, after seeing how greatly they suffered there, under the boot of a brutal itinerary and high expectations around drinking.

When the group got up to space and started floating—everyone’s perfectly coiffed hair flying everywhere—the group huddled to chant “take up space” and then, like when you pregame too hard before hitting a bar, they all split up to do their own thing. Katy Perry held a daisy (her daughter is named Daisy) up for the camera and teared up. She also revealed the setlist for her upcoming Lifetimes tour on a cardboard butterfly before letting it float away. Elsewhere in the pod, Lauren Sánchez held up a plushie of “Flynn”—the dyslexic fly character from her children’s book The Fly Who Flew to Space—and, like a drunk person, kissed it and said, “Proud of you, Flynn.”


Bowe held up an embroidered patch that said “Bahamas” with the Bahamian flag, while Nguyen gave a shout-out to Vietnam. Apparently, at one point Katy Perry sang “What a Wonderful World,” which isn’t my choice for karaoke, but a solid one nonetheless. Like the maid of honor who takes her job very seriously, Perry never sat still. In another shot she is upside down making the shape of a heart with her hands. Then, like any group of girls who knows their horoscopes, someone screams out, “Look at the moon!”

The spacecraft’s descent had the same audio footprint—cackling, screaming, whooping—as one of those 18-person party bikes that you see bachelorettes drinking on all over Nashville. When they got out of the vehicle, back on Earth, like any exhausted bridal party member landing at LaGuardia at 2:00 a.m. Monday morning, it was as though they’d spent years up there. Perry and King each kissed the arid ground once they’d disembarked the pod, with King exclaiming, “Thank you, Jesus.” Sánchez and Nguyen both sobbed. And I must point out that Bezos, the eager groom, fell on his face as he maneuvered to free his bride.

In a post-game interview Perry said the experience in space was up there with “meditation or the Hoffman Process”—the uber-expensive retreat where celebrities go to meditate and exorcise childhood traumas—because “You’re, like, really finding the love for yourself because you got to trust in yourself.”

She added that she felt connected to the “divine feminine.”

The purpose of the trip wasn’t to bring back any moon rocks or calculate the astronomical unit between stars. The point was just to be—literally to take up space—up near the edge of Earth. Much like the bachelorette, the concept was to look good, have a great time, and do a lot of screaming. And honestly? Mission accomplished.

Now come the Instagrams. If you have a full face of makeup, had your hair done, and schlepped to West Texas for your friends to blast through the sound barrier, you may as well get some likes out of it. And sounding for all the world like someone who narrowly survived Atlantic City and who has a rehearsal dinner to plan, Sánchez told the on-site Blue Origin interviewer, “I had to come back. I mean, we’re getting married.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/katy-perry-c...dRedirect=true