On Monday, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos sent six women — pop star Katy Perry, TV news anchor Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen — into space (barely) on board one of his Blue Origin spacecraft. They spent about ten minutes above the atmosphere, then returned safely to Earth.
Interesting factoid: despite Jeff Bezos owning the spacecraft, none of the passengers could access Prime Video after liftoff.
If you’ll pardon me for picking a nit, I have a problem with the way this story was covered.
Every news report on the mission mentioned that the six women were the “crew.” No, they weren’t. Calling any of them “crew members” confers a status they didn’t earn. None of them had any control of the spacecraft, which was operated entirely by computers and humans still on Earth.
The women were space tourists, or to use a technical term, “passengers,” just like anyone who has taken one of those airport monorails that move people from terminal to terminal with no human at the controls. When I board one of those, I’m no more a member of the crew than I am while sitting on an airplane — even if I do sit in an exit row and accept responsibility for the nearest over-wing door in an emergency.
It’s like calling three kids in the backseat of a family car the “crew.” If all you have to do is buckle your seatbelt, you’re a “passenger.”
Whether or not they deserve to be called “astronauts” is another question, since America’s first man in space, Alan Shepard, didn’t have much more control over his capsule, Freedom 7, when it was launched in 1961. But according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an “astronaut” is defined as “a person who travels beyond the earth’s atmosphere.” So, Katy and Gayle and their fellow passengers weren’t “crew,” but they did qualify as “astronauts” — although by that strict definition Shepard did not, because his first flight was sub-orbital.
And now, a fun paragraph from Dave Barry on this subject:
What made this so historic is that it was the first all-women crew to go into space since the 1963 mission of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, who spent three days alone in a capsule that orbited the Earth 48 times, traveling more than 1.2 million miles. On the surface, her flight may seem more impressive than the Blue Origin mission, but not when we factor in the fact that Katy Perry has over 200 million Instagram followers, whereas Tereshkova had zero.
The other thing I’ve read in some of the news stories about Monday’s mission is that it might inspire girls and young women to want to go into space someday, too. That would be a good thing, but if they do, I hope that they’ll turn their studies towards STEM programs as a launching pad for such a career, rather than trying to get up there by becoming rich and famous.
I would also warn them that they may want to wait at least another four years, because among the many harmful policies put in place by Trump’s administration, achievements of women at NASA have been scrubbed from the agency’s website and history. I bet if you asked the Liar In Chief, nobody left Earth’s atmosphere this week as crew members, passengers, or anything else.
Or if he acknowledged it, he’d make them pay a huge landing tariff.