Gayle King wishes everybody would adopt a more realistic perspective about Monday’s Blue Origin space outing. The “CBS Mornings” co-host has been telling anyone who will listen that what she and her five fellow NS-31 mission crewmembers experienced was not a “ride.”
King insisted it was a true spaceflight that gave her a new impression of how precious life and the Earth are. “You’re way up there and you’re very aware of that,” she told Extra on Tuesday, adding that looking at the Earth from more than 300,000 feet above the ground reminded her to “do better, be better. “
“We can do that, because we’re so small in the scheme of things and we’re not here for a very long time when you really think about it,” King offered. “So we can all be better in what we’re doing in our lives.”
The panorama from 62 miles aloft must be grand, but apparently it’s impossible to read the room from that distance.
Spiritually, sure. King was describing her brush with the Overview Effect, space philosopher Frank White’s term for the cognitive shift a person experiences when viewing the Earth from space. White’s 1987 book discusses how spaceflight augments one’s sense of interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. “All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the [Earth’s] surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon,” he wrote. “The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”
Enjoying the same life-changing gaze as Oprah Winfrey’s best friend requires a person to do a whole lot better financially. Replicating Monday’s starstruck mission requires making a $150,000 deposit (fully refundable!) with Jeff Bezos’ privately-owned space company to get a return phone call.
Don’t hit King with that criticism, because she got hers. “My question is, have y’all been to space? Go to space or go to Blue Origin and see what they do and then come back and say, ‘This is a terrible thing,’” she added. The panorama from 62 miles aloft must be grand, but apparently it’s impossible to read the room from that distance.
NS-31 Astronaut Gayle King. (Blue Origin)
Terrible things are always happening on Earth, regardless of the strides made in space travel. Watching Mae Jamison become the first Black woman to go to space aboard the shuttle Endeavour in September 1992 was inspiring. That same month, natural disasters killed and injured tens of people in Hawaii, France and Nicaragua.
Today, the United States contends with an administration that reviles scientific expertise and quells curiosity. NASA is staring down a possible 50% cut in funding for its science programs. And there are the more earthbound concerns about the president’s needless trade war, launching us into a recession as the living costs continue to ascend.
As such, few commoners saw Monday’s highly publicized private jaunt to the boundary between Earth and space as some giant leap for all womankind. Our ground-level view looked like something far more ordinary: a two-hour and 21-minute Blue Origin infomercial populated with a curated celebrity-heavy crew.
By the numbers, the New Shepard rocket’s 31st space mission really did make history. King, pop star Katy Perry, documentarian Kerianne Flynn, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyễn, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe and Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez comprised the largest all-woman space mission crew since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 solo flight. Tereshkova spent nearly three days up there, while Blue Origin’s six-woman party touched the darkness beyond the blue for about 11 minutes.
Not all of what they achieved was nominal. The voyage made Nguyễn the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space — that’s huge. It also established Sánchez as the first future Bezos wife to achieve weightlessness 62 miles above the Earth, just like Reese Witherspoon’s TV anchor on “The Morning Show.”
Meanwhile, what was the tech titan’s ex Mackenzie Scott doing? Just giving away her fortune – more than $19 billion of it so far – to materially make the world better right now.
Sánchez has talents apart from her betrothed, too. Blue Origin’s coverage identifies her as an Emmy award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, pilot, vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund and mother of three. She brought this space mission together, a glossy Elle magazine feature revealed earlier this month.
NS-31 Astronaut Lauren Sánchez celebrates a successful mission to space. (Blue Origin)
That fashion shoot doubled as a preview of Monday’s glamorous spectacle. Scan a few YouTube videos from Blue Origin’s previous excursions, mostly enjoyed by everyday millionaires and some lucky contest winners, and you’ll notice a dramatic difference in production values.
Monday’s company-produced coverage was emceed by NFL commentator Charissa Thompson and co-hosted by CNN Space & Defense correspondent Kristin Fisher, herself the daughter of NASA astronauts, and Blue Origin executive Ariane Cornell. All the voices, from ground control to awe-struck passengers, were female. And the co-hosts took all available opportunities to tout Blue Origin’s impressive safety record as if they were selling a line of vehicles.
They were, just not to you and me. Blue Origin is a top government contractor. Two weeks ago, Bezos’ company was awarded $2.4 billion in the United States Space Force’s latest round of procurement for future rocket launches, significantly less than the $5.9 billion the National Security Space Launch program awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Sánchez would not be in a position to pull off this PR space retreat if her show of female empowerment didn’t serve the interests of one of the planet’s richest men.
This, following another Musk spacecraft exploding mid-air in March, and several months after the world’s richest man paid an estimated $288 million for controlling interest in Donald Trump’s whims. Bezos only ponied up $1 million for Trump’s re-election fund, along with preventing The Washington Post, which he owns, from endorsing Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris. Yet his rockets land as precisely as Musk’s, with fewer reports of publicly embarrassing “rapid unscheduled disassemblies.”
Never mind all that – look up, America! Before Thompson accurately described the NS-31 mission crew as “the stars of the show,” she invited Fisher to explain why the public should care about this private trip above others. “I mean, there are some big names on board this flight, and so I think it’s really easy to kind of get sucked into the celebrity of it, right? But to do that would really be missing the point,” Fisher said.
Which would be . . .? “This type of space flight is what’s making space accessible to everyone, and it really fits the pattern of human exploration from the very beginning,” she continued. “First, you send the professional explorers, the military test pilots. Then the civilians, the scientists, the engineers — kind of the experts — and then you send everybody else: the singers, the journalists and the activists. So this really fits a pattern here.”
Yes, very much like the Samantha Jones rule of fame dictates on “Sex and the City.” “First come the gays, then the girls, then? The industry.” That’s a version of what we’re seeing unfold now, only in space.
Like Samantha’s affair with dear Smith Jerrod, this highly publicized moment is mainly about image-making. Sánchez would not be in a position to pull off this PR space retreat if her show of female empowerment didn’t serve the interests of one of the planet’s richest men.
Monday’s New Shepard expedition reminded me of another theoretical concept, the Total Perspective Vortex. This fictional machine, dreamed up by Douglas Adams for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” radio series, proposed that the unlucky beings placed inside it would be crushed by experiencing their absolute insignificance in relation to the rest of the known universe.
Its inventor built the TPV to irritate his wife and ended up scrambling her brain, Adams wrote. “[B]ut to his satisfaction, he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
Perry’s pop-feminist anthems, along with her achievement badge for having survived 14 months of marriage to a predatory xenomorph, make her this mission’s closest equivalent to Ellen Ripley, if the “Alien” queen had a soft spot for daisies.
If Adam’s fictional inventor were around to witness the NS-31 mission, he might revise that thought. King pointed out that the NS-31 trek followed the same path as Alan Shepard, for whom the rocket in which she traveled is named. “You never see a man, a male astronaut, who’s going up in space, and they say, ‘Oh, he took a ride.’ It’s always referred to as a flight or a journey,” King told Extra, “so I feel that’s a little disrespectful to what the mission was and the work that Blue Origin does.”
A small sense of proportion might have helped King realize that appearing to compare herself to the first American to travel to space may not help her case. Still, Adams understood the comedic potential in the arrogance of privilege. He sent his “Hitchhiker’s” hero Zaphod Beeblebrox through the Vortex only to have the machine confirm his self-regard: “I’m a really terrific and great guy!”
Bezos would like us to think he’s that guy, too. His aeronautics company may not have been the first to sail beyond the planet’s upper atmosphere; Sir Richard Branson beat him in that .01% space race. However, Bezos invited Captain Kirk onboard one of his vessels in 2021, scoring nonagenarian actor William Shatner a record entry as the oldest living person to touch the black.
NS-31 Astronaut Katy Perry. (Blue Origin)
Sánchez’s invite list, therefore, had to be consciously tailored to meet a certain bar for the brand. If her design was to uplift leading women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, she could have taken her pick of geniuses to make history with her, but where’s the clickbait in that?
Instead, she aimed for mid-range star power and good stories. Perry’s pop-feminist anthems, along with her achievement badge for having survived 14 months of marriage to a predatory xenomorph, make her this mission’s closest equivalent to Ellen Ripley, if the “Alien” queen had a soft spot for daisies.
Reportedly, she was asked to sing her hit “Firework,” which, considering her proximity to some of the most combustible substances in existence, might have tested God’s urge for a belly laugh. Covering Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” was a wiser selection; its lyrics don’t include the potentially regrettable lines “Make ’em go, ‘Oh, oh, oh’/ As you shoot across the sky.”
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As for the non-celebrities, Flynn directed a documentary about Lilly Ledbetter’s fight for equal pay. Nguyễn was instrumental in drafting the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, which Congress passed unanimously in 2016.
She’s also a Harvard graduate who put her plan to join NASA on hold after she was raped to advocate for fellow survivors’ rights. Participating in the NS-31 space mission is the fulfillment of a long-deferred dream. When she emerged from the capsule, she revealed that one of the items she brought with her to space was her hospital bracelet from the day that became the dividing line between the woman she was and what she became. “I got to honor her today,” Nguyễn told Thompson about her former self, one of the webcast’s few legitimately moving moments.
Meanwhile, Bowe, who has won multiple awards for her contributions to aerospace engineering, revealed that she performed “as a science payload operator flying multiple experiments,” including wearing a BioButton for TRISH, a NASA-funded research institute, to study how women’s bodies respond to spaceflight. “I didn’t go to space just for the view,” Bowe posted on Instagram Wednesday.
Maybe we’re all looking at this the wrong way. Since Bezos’ main competitor in the world’s richest man pageant is running around bragging about his plan to seed more wombs, these testimonials emphasize the nobility in the Blue Origin founder’s space flight sponsorship.
If only Bowe and Nguyễn’s mission accomplishments weren’t overshadowed by Perry waving a daisy offering bumper sticker wisdom about “collective energy” and “making space for future women and taking up space and belonging.” She means well, but that doesn’t change her role in promoting the interests of a billionaire who’s more interested in leaving most of humanity behind as opposed to saving it.
Bezos would like us to believe women can do anything within prescribed limits, whether that means the Kármán line dividing the world from the rest of the galaxy or the price point closing off space travel from the rest of us.
King had some thoughts about that, too. “If you get enough people who are interested” in commercial space travel, she proposed, “it doesn’t have to be that expensive.” If you’re famous enough, it might not cost anything at all.
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