This all-woman space flight is nothing more than a male fantasy (2025)

My tolerance for “bubblegum feminism” is really very high. I’ve always been a friend to the lipstick and pink cupcakes, the “girl power on a tote bag” feminism, because I think it’s a useful entry point to fighting the patriarchy.

But my tolerance does have a limit, and this week I learned where that is: putting a load of famous women on a rocket and flying them to the absolute minimum location to call it space travel, then bringing them home and calling it some kind of triumph for the sisterhood.

If you’ve managed to miss this story, billionaire Jeff Bezos is another very rich man throwing his efforts into space travel, and in a bid to conquer the final frontier (or maybe to seem a bit more woke than Elon Musk) he put together the first all-female crew since Russian engineer Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight to space in 1963.

The crew includes popstar Katy Perry, author Lauren Sanchez, journalist and TV presenter Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and filmmaker Kerianne Flynn.

The mission will be the most recent flight for the New Shepard programme, and according to the press release, it aims to “create a lasting impact that will inspire generations.”

Inspire them to do what, I wonder? The majority of these women aren’t astronauts or scientists; they’re celebrities who are functionally taking a commercial flight, which just happens to go really, really high. I’m not sure how it’s supposed to inspire little girls to dream of becoming astronauts, given that none of these women will be newly classed as astronauts by the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA or the US military, all of which have eligibility requirements which are not met by this flight.

None of this is about inspiring young women, equality or feminism. Just as Musk once fired a Tesla into space, Bezos is sending a load of famous women up there to make a point. It’s about powerful men, who historically haven’t been the greatest allies to the feminist cause, trying to demonstrate their potency by doing something objectively complicated and difficult.

Perhaps my favourite part of the faux-feminist extravaganza was the reveal of the space suits they’ll be wearing. The suits, designed by Sanchez herself, are a striking contrast to previous outfits worn on the company’s previous space missions, which were gender neutral and baggy. Instead, Sanchez collaborated with Oscar de la Renta’s creative directors, Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim to create a suit that Sanchez described as elegant but also “brings a little spice to space.”

Hard to imagine Tim Peake saying anything similar, isn’t it? But never mind, the most important thing is that the all-female mission are cladded in sexy, tight, costume-adjacent space suits.

Space travel has always been a strange area for women. Only one in five space industry workers are women, and historically, multiple successes at NASA and in space science have been overlooked. And I’m afraid putting a bunch of beautiful, successful women into space (extremely briefly) feels very much like a continuation of the same thing.

Putting Katy Perry into what’s functionally an Uber to the edge of space, while she’s wearing a skintight suit, gets a front page, but it’s got literally nothing to do with social progress.

There is so, so much that could and should change for women working in astrophysics and in science more widely. It’s well understood that the STEM industries have a woman problem, and high profile celebrity non-astronauts are not the answer to that problem.

Encouraging companies in this field to pay women properly and fairly, providing on-site childcare and fully funded, lengthy maternity leave with a flexible return-to-work program would be progressive.

Blue Origin’s HR policies aren’t publicly available, and I’m inclined to think that if they were meaningfully feminist, that wouldn’t be the case. Changing how women interact with traditionally male-dominated fields is a worthy aim, but it’s also time-consuming and expensive when it’s genuine, and who wants that?

Honestly, there’s no better metaphor for corporate enthusiasm for equality-washing than sending a load of celebrities into space for a photo opportunity on a mission that only just technically enters space and doesn’t render any of the women on board astronauts. It’s predictable, frustrating, and, at this point, very dull.