Blue Origin’s purely female space flight asks women to shoot for the stars

For the first time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963, a spaceship with only women will enter board. Blue Origins purely female spatial flight crew, which also includes pop star Katy Perry, will take off this spring.

Jeff Bezos’ crew comes from successful and well-known women, including television presenter Gayle King, producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and journalist Lauren Sanchez. The advertising material for the flight claims that Perry “hopes that her trip will encourage her daughter and others to grab the stars literally and in a figurative sense.

The glamorous look of this space travel is intended to encourage women to strive for their dreams. The brilliant story says to others that they can be just like these extraordinary women. Because behind this exhausting ideal there is a more problematic story about successful women in science and their role in public.

My doctoral thesis examines memoirs written by Women astronauts. They build appealing representations of successful and extraordinary women. But in practice, their success stories for ordinary women are impossible to emulate.

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This is embodied in the reaction of Astronaut Catherine Coleman to wear a spaceplay. In her memoirs from 2024, she wrote: “Most of the time I followed the approach that I would still simply wear it if the suit didn’t fit – and would wear it well. Wear it better than anyone else awaits.”

As this quote shows, women who have traveled in space tend to have worked as exceptionally hard to deny the norms of what is expected of them and to compensate for systemic prejudices.

From the beginning, Coleman emphasizes that she always had to be an “exception” of the rest of humanity, which feels alarming. However, she also consistently suggests that her life was intended to be like that. “The room felt at home for me,” she says, tacitly admitted that it should always be there.

Jemison, the first African -American woman in space, also expresses this feeling of fate in her memoirs from 2001. “I sat quietly and looked out of the windows on the flight deck,” she writes. “Strange, but I always knew that I would be here. I look down and around and saw the earth, the moon and the stars, I just felt like I was.”

The crew that wants to go on board in the Blue Origin Flight wants to be storytellers as well as in their memoir female astronauts. But the well-known members of his crew are reminiscent of the fact that hard work only part of this special story is-fortune and privileges also play a role.

Eileen Collins was the first woman to put a space shuttle. In her 2021 memoirs, she describes the pressure and expectations of work in a field dominated by men. She found that difficult decisions and the need to correctly perform critical actions.

When she says: “Current and future women’s pilots count on me to do a perfect job up here”, she illustrates the hard exam that astronauts of women are often subject when they are the first of their gender.

Behind the cover

The problem with popular scientific memoirs is that they are consistently marketed as honest and truthful works. These books promise to reveal who the Astronaut is actually, but they are actually carefully curated pictures of the women who represent them.

While they intend to motivate and inspire others, the memoirs do not always do this honestly. This draws a parallel to the Blue Origin flight.

Many of these stories are trying to rewrite past stereotypes of scientists and at the same time function in response to contemporary appetite for memoirs that reveal the internal emotional world of their subjects. For example, Kathryn Sullivan discusses “wrestling” with visceral “pain” because they are unable to start their mission due to technical problems.

This concept reflects why there is feverish public expectation that the Blue Origin Flight-Crew will answer a perspective shift trip and experience “deep emotions from space”.

While the current reporting in connection with the start is implementing it as a celebration of collective progress, the people from this space -crew do not reflect most women.

If the Blue Origin Mission is to be a lodi star for a universal feminist narrative, whereby the space flight of women is used as a measure of progress, it should also be taken into account with the incongruencies and uniqueness of the experiences of women. Ultimately, it is important to move from stories that inform us that science, spatial flight and success are only synonymous for fame and extraordinary.