Blue Origin’s all-female spaceflight urges women to shoot for the stars — but astronaut memoirs reveal the cost of being exceptional
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Jasleen Chana is a PhD candidate at UCL in the department of Science and Technology Studies.
For the first time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963, a spacecraft will fly with only women aboard. Blue Origin’s all-female spaceflight crew, which includes pop star Katy Perry, is set to take off this spring.
Jeff Bezos’ crew is assembled from successful and well-known women, also including television presenter Gayle King, producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and journalist Lauren Sanchez. Promotional material for the flight claims that Perry “hopes her journey encourages her daughter and others to reach for the stars, literally and figuratively.”
The glamorous optics of this spaceflight are supposedly designed to encourage women to strive for their dreams. The glossy narrative tells others that they can be just like these extraordinary women. Yet, behind this aspirational ideal, there is a more problematic story regarding successful women in science and their roles in public.
My PhD research examines memoirs written by women astronauts. They construct appealing depictions of women who are successful and exceptional. But in practice, their success stories are nigh on impossible for ordinary women to emulate.
Related: Meet the crew for Blue Origin’s upcoming all-female spaceflight with Katy Perry
This is epitomized in astronaut Catherine Coleman’s reaction to wearing a spacesuit designed for men. In her 2024 memoir, she wrote: “Most of the time, I took the approach that if the suit didn’t fit, I would simply wear it anyway — and wear it well. Wear it better than anyone expected.”
As this quote shows, women who have travelled to space tend to construct themselves as having worked exceptionally hard to deny the norms of what is expected of them and to offset systemic biases.
From the outset of her memoir, Coleman emphasizes that she’s always had to be an “exception” from the rest of humanity, which feels alienating. But she also consistently suggests that her life was destined to be this way. “Space felt like home to me,” she says, tacitly acknowledging that she was always meant to be there.
Mae Jemison, who was the first African American woman in space, also expresses this sense of destiny in her 2001 memoir. “I perched quietly, looking out of the windows on the flight deck,” she writes. “Strange, but I always knew I’d be here. Looking down and all around me, seeing the Earth, the moon, and the stars, I just felt like I belonged.”
The crew set to board the Blue Origin flight want to be storytellers in the same way that women astronauts are in their memoirs. But the well-known members of its crew are a reminder that hard work is only part of this particular story — fortune and privilege also play a part.
Eileen Collins was the first woman to pilot and command a space shuttle. In her 2021 memoir, she details the pressures and expectations of working in a male-dominated field. She found that it exacerbated already tricky decision-making and the need to perform critical actions correctly.
When she says “current and future women pilots are counting on me to do a perfect job up here,” she exemplifies the harsh scrutiny that women astronauts are often subject to when they are the first of their gender.
Behind the cover
The issue with popular scientific memoirs is that they are consistently marketed as honest and truthful works. These books promise to reveal who the astronaut actually is, but they are, in fact, carefully curated images of the women they portray.
So, while they intend to motivate and inspire others, the memoirs don’t always do so in a totally honest way. This draws a parallel with the Blue Origin flight.
Many of these narratives seek to rewrite past stereotypes of scientists while also functioning as a response to the contemporary appetite for memoirs that reveal the interior emotional world of their subjects. For example, Kathryn Sullivan discusses “wrestling” with visceral “pangs” of pain at being unable to launch her mission due to technical issues.
This concept reflects why there is a fevered public expectation that the Blue Origin flight crew will embark on a perspective-shifting journey and experience “deep emotions from space”.
While current coverage surrounding the launch frames it as a celebration of collective advancement, the people comprising this spaceflight crew do not reflect most women.
If the Blue Origin mission is to be a lodestar for a universal feminist narrative, using women’s spaceflight as a measure of progress, then it should also be considered in tandem with the incongruities and uniqueness of women’s experiences. Ultimately, it is important to move away from narratives that inform us that science, spaceflight and success are only synonymous with fame and exceptionalism.
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