Valentina Tereshkova, Dr. Svetlana Savitskaya, Dr. Sally Ride, Dr. Judith Resnik, and Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan are the names that should be eternally recognised as the first five women in space. The millionaires and social climbers of Blue Origin aren't even in the top 100.
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Watching the Blue Origin flight made on billionaire Jeff Bezos's, suitably phallic, space toy was enough to simultaneously make me never want to leave the earth and not be a part of it anymore. The highly publicised flight was a sham from beginning to end and did more damage to feminism than good.
Somehow, The Vacuum Of Space Became Emptier For 3 Minutes
Blue Origin was all of about 15 minutes, with 3 of them being in actual Space. It was nothing more than a highly publicized advert for Jeff Bezos' current flagrant waste of money and resources. The six women who went up there couldn't have been picked with less tact either.
The short flight, in which Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguy?...n, Gayle King, Katy Perry, Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez entered what is considered space, was a stunt whipped up to encourage other wealthy millionaires to justify Jeff Bezos's phenomenally expensive personal entry to the billionaire's space race.
While drifting miles above the earth, they spent all of about 10 seconds looking out the window. The rest of it was spent checking that the cameras were on them. They filled their time pulling meaningless trinkets out of their pockets in an attempt to humanize themselves. Their fitted space suits, paired with high heels and carefully picked-out makeup, were more publicized before their flight than their 2 days of training.
Each of the passengers on Blue Origin was so infatuated with themselves that any gravitas that could have been in the millionaire's pleasure cruise was lost. Each spent so much time vying for the spotlight that it became painful to watch. For three minutes, the six celebrities gazed into the cameras with more vapidity than the vacuum outside Blue Origin.
Blue Origin was not a success for the everyman, and it certainly wasn't a success for women. It was an embarrassing show of vanity from both Besos and the people on board.
Blue Origin Robbing Women Of Their Accolades
The first woman went to space in 1963 aboard the Russian Vostok 6. This was during the US/USSR space race. At the time, Nikolai Kamanin, director of cosmonaut training, read that women were training to go to space aboard the US Mercury 13. His response was simple. In his diary, he wrote, "We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American."
Since then, more than 100 women have been to space, performing space walks, prolonged residences on space stations, and the many duties required of any astro/cosmonaut. Watching the unqualified celebrities of Blue Origin jostling for media screentime was just an embarrassment.
There is little human achievement to be pulled from the Blue Origin publicity stunt. All we have seen is that, for a few minutes, millionaires can now pay to take selfies in space. We can now testify that Botox and lip plumper can withstand a few moments of zero G, however.
Not one of the women paid respects to those that came before them. Many hard-working women paved the way for the fairer sexes' battle into science, space, and beyond. They were all far too busy making their obscenely wasteful pleasure cruise all about them to think about anything vaguely meaningful.
As the cherry on the cake, knowing that Katy Perry sang 'What A Wonderful World' on the way down would have been enough for me to attempt atmospheric reentry outside of the shuttle.
