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What happened on Blue Origin’s NS-31 flight?
Blue Origin launched NS-31 from Launch Site One in west Texas aboard its New Shepard rocket-and-capsule system. The six passengers were Lauren Sánchez, Katy Perry, Gayle King, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, civil-rights activist and researcher Amanda Nguyễn, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. Blue Origin calls NS-31 its 31st New Shepard flight and its 11th human spaceflight. Blue Origin’s human-flight mission records list the flight and its passengers.
New Shepard’s flight was suborbital: it briefly carried the passengers above the commonly used U.S. boundary of space, then returned them to Earth. It was not an orbital expedition. Blue Origin’s public mission description presents NS-31 as a human spaceflight, not as a research mission with a stated primary scientific objective.
What did Emily Ratajkowski criticize?
Ratajkowski’s social-media reaction focused on environmental concerns, extreme wealth and the gulf between a short recreational flight and the way it was celebrated. She questioned the optics of invoking a connection to Earth while taking part in a flight operated by Blue Origin, the private space company founded by Jeff Bezos. She also argued that putting wealthy, famous women in space should not automatically be treated as feminist progress.
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Her comments were a critique of the mission’s environmental and political symbolism, not a claim that women should be excluded from aerospace. The environmental impact of this particular flight should be treated as an attributed concern: the available coverage reports her criticism, rather than supplying a quantified emissions analysis. The Guardian’s account of the reaction describes her comments and the wider backlash.
Why did Olivia Munn call the flight “gluttonous”?
Munn questioned what the trip accomplished for people on Earth and contrasted the expense and exclusivity of private space travel with ordinary people’s financial pressures. Calling it “a bit gluttonous,” she challenged the choice to devote substantial resources to a brief luxury experience when its practical public benefit was unclear.
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That is an argument about cost, utility and conspicuous consumption—not opposition to women participating in spaceflight. The reviewed sources do not establish a reliable ticket price or total mission cost, so specific dollar figures should not be inferred from her criticism.
How did Amy Schumer respond?
Schumer’s response was primarily satire, rather than the detailed environmental or economic argument made by Ratajkowski and Munn. In Instagram videos, she pretended she had been invited onto the flight at the last minute. The joke played on the mission’s celebrity-focused publicity and the way space travel was presented almost as a glamorous social invitation.
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Olivia Wilde also amplified the mockery by sharing a meme about Perry’s return to Earth. Grouping these reactions together as though all the women made the same argument obscures the difference between direct criticism and parody.
In what sense was the flight historic?
Blue Origin presented NS-31 as the first all-female passenger group on a spaceflight since Valentina Tereshkova flew alone on the Soviet Union’s Vostok 6 mission in 1963. The significance is specific: NS-31 was an all-female passenger flight and an all-female New Shepard human mission. It was not the first time women had gone to space, and the claim should not be broadened into “the first all-female crew in space” without defining crew and the scope of the comparison.
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“Historic” here refers chiefly to representation and visibility. It does not make NS-31 equivalent to an orbital expedition, a government space mission or a research flight.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Were the passengers astronauts?
In ordinary media and promotional language, the passengers may be called astronauts. The FAA uses a narrower classification for commercial human spaceflight: it lists people carried on these flights as space-flight participants and says it no longer designates commercial passengers as “astronauts.” The FAA’s recognition threshold is at least 50 statute miles above Earth’s surface, and its records recognize all six NS-31 passengers. Recognition does not make them flight crew.
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The agency distinguishes people with operational or safety-critical duties as flight crew from space-flight participants carried aboard a vehicle. Government astronauts, meanwhile, are designated by NASA or an international partner. For this flight, “commercial spaceflight participants” is the most technically precise description; “astronauts” is best attributed to popular or company usage. See the FAA’s recognition records, its human spaceflight terminology and its explanation of commercial space oversight.
How did the passengers and Blue Origin defend the mission?
King and Sánchez emphasized the flight’s symbolic value: seeing women with different backgrounds take part in spaceflight could inspire girls and young women, and the mission represented the work of Blue Origin employees who designed and operated the vehicle. That case treats visibility and representation as meaningful outcomes even when a flight is not primarily a scientific expedition.
Critics apply a different test: whether a short, exclusive trip justifies its resource use, environmental impact and claims of broad social benefit. Inspiration may matter to passengers and observers, but it does not by itself settle questions about inequality, emissions or who benefits from commercial spaceflight.
What the backlash says about space tourism
The dispute is not simply a choice between celebrating women’s participation and opposing it. NS-31 can be a visible milestone for women in a field long associated with male astronauts while also functioning as a high-profile commercial experience with no primary research objective stated in Blue Origin’s public mission description.
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- Purpose: Blue Origin framed the flight as human spaceflight; the public mission description does not establish a primary scientific research goal.
- Resources and environment: Critics challenged the environmental optics and the allocation of resources to luxury space tourism; the sources cited here do not quantify the flight’s emissions or total cost.
- Marketing and inequality: The celebrity framing helped draw attention but also strengthened the impression that spaceflight remains an exclusive experience associated with extreme wealth.
Those standards can lead to different conclusions without requiring anyone to deny the passengers’ experience or the flight’s representational significance.
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