On Monday, 6 celebrities formed an all-female crew aboard a Blue Origin space capsule for a suborbital space flight that lasted 11 minutes. The women included the wife of Jeff Bezos, singer Katy Perry and CBS presenter Gayle King. Public reaction was not what Bezos expected for him or his company, which is an imitation of Musk’s SpaceX.
Like the race card after Obama, the female card has been revoked thanks to unlikable people like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Abusing power with prosecutions of Trump by Fani Willis and Tish James also was unhelpful.
NYT called the trip, “One Giant Stunt for Womankind.”
Its critic Amanda Hess said, “the Soviet Union cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she made a solo trip to the Earth’s orbit in 1963.
“Tereshkova spent three days in space, circled the Earth 48 times and landed an international celebrity and feminist icon.”
That was more than 60 years ago.
These 6 were up there for 11 minutes.
Hess also wrote:
As Blue Origin loudly celebrates women as consumers of private space travel, it has elided the experiences of professional female astronauts—including the little details that humanized their own flights. Elle suggested that the Blue Origin flight “will be the first time anybody went to space with their hair and makeup done.” As Perry put it, “Space is going to finally be glam.” But in fact, female astronauts have long brought their beauty work into space with them. Life magazine published an image of Tereshkova at the hairdresser, explaining that she was “primping for orbit.” The astronaut Rhea Seddon, who first flew to space in 1985, took NASA-tested cosmetics onboard, knowing that she would be heavily photographed and the images widely circulated.
Now I am not going to knock their little trip, not because I particularly liked it but because I am lazy and there are so many lefty women to quote.
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SubscribedHeather Schwedel of Slate wrote:
As stupid as I thought it would be, it was even stupider. It was one thing to understand intellectually that Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez’s much hyped “all-female” trip to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket would in actuality only be an underwhelming 11 minutes long. But it was another to watch it play out over a multi-hour, breathless livestream that culminated with Perry kissing the Earth like a soldier returning from war and not a multimillionaire returning from the world’s shortest influencer trip. If this flight is to have any world-historical significance, it will be for achieving previously uncharted levels of tastelessness. They took up space, all right—space in our psyches that we will never get back.
A day later, I still can’t really believe it. Who would have thought it was even possible for Perry in particular to seem even more out of touch than she was proven to be last year, when she released a new album that seemed woefully trapped in 2016? And yet Perry was all too happy to not only join this trip and triumphantly become the first pop star to promote her concert in space, which she did when she held up a butterfly-shaped piece of paper to the cameras inside the shuttle midflight with her new set list apparently written on it. We’ll just ignore that the writing was so small that no one could actually read it. At least, as King revealed afterward, Perry magnanimously chose to serenade her fellow astronauts on the trip not with one of her own songs but with What a Wonderful World, though even that would have had me reaching for the emergency exit hatch.
As tacky as Perry is, as the driving forces behind this mission, Sánchez and her fiancé, Jeff Bezos, who owns Blue Origin, are surely worse. When Sánchez landed, she was first out. Bezos gave her a big hug and reminded her that now she was free to go see her “babies,” which I assume meant her kids. “Where are my babies?” she exclaimed. “They’re over here, go see ’em,” Bezos encouraged her. She clearly has that man eating out of the palm of her hand. Later, Sánchez reflected on her time looking down at the Earth: “You look at this, and you’re like, ‘We’re all in this together.’ ” Are we, though?
The 6 celebrities did not do themselves any favors.
King said, “Please don’t call it a ‘ride. We duplicated the same trajectory that Alan Shepard did back in the day, pretty much. No one called that a ‘ride.’
“It was called a flight, it was called a journey. There was nothing frivolous about what we did.”
Alan Shepard? Puh-leeze. He was a Naval Academy graduate, World War II vet, pilot and part of the first seven graduates of astronaut school, which was run by Chuck Yeager.
The 6 celebrities followed Freedom 7’s course? So what? You can retrace the route of the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria but that doesn’t make you Christopher Columbus.
Kirsten Fleming of the New York Post mocked the sense of entitlement of teh 6 celebrities—entitlement to be idolized.
Fleming wrote, “The entire vanity project was choreographed and produced like a music video, with Perry clutching a setlist for her upcoming tour (thanks for the free advertising, Jeff Bezos!) as she floated around the New Shepard spacecraft.”
The televised event produced Fleming’s best line, “For the first time in the history of flight, barf bags were needed for spectators on the ground.”
Perhaps Bezos and the rest learned a lesson. Being female no longer is a big deal because you were—to quote Lady Gaga—Born That Way. (I wonder if that song is now considered transphobic.) Role models for girls? No, Sally Ride and Suni Williams are. These 6 were passengers.
Besides, how many (naughty word) role models do little girls need today?
But T&A will get you noticed and the media loves covering the media, so Perry and King got a lot of ink and airtime. Williams didn’t get as much. You remember her.
The New York Post reported a month ago:
The US astronauts stranded on the International Space Station joyfully emerged from their rescue capsule following a dramatic but smooth return to Earth Tuesday — months after their days-long jaunt in orbit turned into a headline-grabbing space odyssey.
Butch Wilmore, 62, and 59-year-old Suni Williams splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Fla., aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule just before 6 p.m. ET Tuesday, concluding a nine-month stint in space that was supposed to last just eight days when it launched in June 2024.
“Butch, Suni, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home,” a Mission Control dispatcher radioed the crew moments after the capsule Dragon Freedom splashed down.
Less than an hour later, the duo—along with American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov—were extracted from the capsule onboard a recovery vessel, and each was filmed beaming, waving and pumping their fists as they were helped to their feet and whisked away on wheelchairs.
Bezos didn’t rescue them. Musk did. Biden wouldn’t let Musk rescue them, which did some damage to Williams. Williams is an astronaut going where no one has gone before. She paid a price. Thanks to that extra time without gravity, her chin now looks like she should be on a broom chasing Dorothy and her little dog too.
Bezos treated his wife and 5 celebrities to an episode of Real Housewives of Suborbital Space; Musk saved two actual astronauts.
Perry said her crew put the ass back in astronaut. Yes, yes, yes. Most people would agree but that’s not as a compliment.
This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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