The Impact of Blue Origin’s All-Woman Flight

On April 14, 2025, Blue Origin launched its first all-female crewed space flight. The flight took eleven minutes to launch, cross the Kármán line, and land. It took even less time for the responses, mostly critical, to roll in.

While some hailed the flight as a historic moment for women in space, criticism grew until it eclipsed any novelty of the all-women crew. That criticism is not unfounded. The crew included singer Katy Perry, film producer Kerianne Flynn, journalists Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, and astronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen. While Bowe and Nguyen are well-qualified for the role, the other four women brought a storm of controversy that overshadowed these two women scientists.

Blue Origin’s flights are known for controversy, with many calling them space tourism for the rich and famous. With one seat on a Blue Origin flight listed at $200,000 to $450,000, it is an apt description, although not everyone has to pay those prices. Some “guests” are given seats for free. Jeff Bezos declined to reveal who paid for seats on this flight and who didn’t, which aligns with Blue Origin’s usual practice. 

LunchboxLarry, Wikimedia Commons

This flight, in particular, received far more criticism than other Blue Origin flights. It wasn’t necessarily that all the participants were women, but that fact did play a role in the criticism. Many felt the flight was performative activism and that simply launching an all-female crew did nothing to further the roles of women in space and STEM. Others felt that the money would have been better spent supporting women on Earth. In a Forbes article, Gemma Allen wrote, “Blue Origin brilliantly marketed the mission as a feel-good, feminist-flavored moment of uplift. But there has been little evidence of any commitment to women in space.”

Her words capture precisely why the flight left a bitter taste in the mouths of so many watching it, especially women. While it’s true the crew was diverse, and that representation is inspiring for others, the fact remains that space has long been a difficult barrier for women to cross. Allen goes on to highlight that women are deeply underrepresented in space and STEM, and that “these disparities didn't appear overnight—they've been built over time.”

Olivia Hanoff echoes that thread in her article for The DePaulia, “A space capsule full of women, but still no progress.” Hanoff writes, “When I see these wealthy women parading around space and calling it 'trailblazing for women,' it honestly feels like a slap in the face to what the average woman is facing here on Earth this very second.”

Much of the criticism stems from this idea, that a spaceflight full of privileged women was tone deaf to the realities many women face. However, Deana Weibel looked at the flight from her perspective as a cultural anthropologist, writing in The Space Review that the flight “was not only a publicity stunt for rich people. It was not only an expensive indulgence that spent money on space instead of putting it into the hands of charities or funding real science. It was, simultaneously, a spiritual experience, a celebration of women, and a disruption of the traditional narrative of the “steely-eyed missile man” as the only truly legitimate type of person to go into space.” Weibel offers the perspective that this flight is a glimpse of what space travel could be if women are allowed the chance to occupy more space in space. 

When Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman in space on a Blue Origin flight in November, she acknowledged the privilege she held in experiencing the flight, and that commercial space travel has dramatically increased the number of women who have flown in space, as 65 of the first 100 women who have flown in space have done so within the last five years. “I’m hopeful that numbers 101 to 1,000 will come about 10 to 20 times faster,” she said in an interview with Space.com. 

Whether Blue Origin’s all-women space flight was a publicity stunt or a genuine but tone-deaf attempt to reach a milestone for women in space, it certainly ignited debate over what real progress looks like and how to get there.

UNOOSA (United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs recently released a landmark study Space for Women, which could offer more long-term solutions to how to get more women involved in space. Blue Origin, for its part, doesn’t have any more crewed flights scheduled yet for the rest of 2025. Even if they create another all-woman crew in the future, it’s unlikely to create quite the fanfare or the firestorm around the event.