Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin flop is bigger than Katy Perry

You know, I was simply going to ignore the bizarre Blue Origin stunt flight from earlier this week. But then it flopped beyond my wildest imagination, and so here we all are.

Doubtless you know the contours already: Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sanchez, pop star Katy Perry, and four other women did a big space tourism trip in the name of performative femiladyism, wearing “space suits” cut so as to require a pair of Spanx underneath. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule,” Sanchez said. “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” Perry said.

This promised to be a marketing bonanza for a nation addled by spectacle. What has happened instead has been a shocking amount of backlash. TikToks mocking Katy Perry’s feigned enthusiasm for “astronomy and astrology.” Suggestions the entire trip was faked. Video footage of what appears to be Bezos literally falling on his face in Texas. Did Bezos even really open the capsule door? Proclamations that the flight “showcased the utter defeat of American feminism.” Social media debates about whether the women aboard were passengers or crew.

I have been sitting here for a couple of hours now trying to figure out how this happened, while my fearless leader has been sending me TikTok after TikTok about how dumb the whole thing was.

Look, the ass has always been in astronaut — NASA mandates that those aboard the ISS do not miss leg day. Even under normal circumstances, Perry, Sanchez and the other women would be guilty of delivering stale rhetoric about how doing space tourism was reclaiming science for the girlies. But here, it was all happening against the insistent drumbeats of budget cuts at actual NASA, while the other rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk rearranged the agency to benefit himself.

The power of private spaceflight outfits like Blue Origin is a policy failure, and an increasingly dangerous one. Once upon a time, the US didn’t need to rely on the unstable rich to get astronauts to space; NASA built its own rockets. But after a series of Republican budget cuts, some libertarian dim bulbs came up with the idea for the Commercial Crew Program, which awarded contracts in 2014. The rhetoric was that it would be lower-cost for someone other than NASA to build NASA’s rockets; in any event, after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, NASA had no means of sending astronauts on its own.

The upside of the Commercial Crew was that it was fixed-price; the downside was that it rendered NASA hopelessly dependent on its contractors: SpaceX and Boeing.

How is that going? Well, Boeing stranded some astronauts — including an actual female astronaut — in space when its Starliner malfunctioned; they had to be rescued from the ISS by SpaceX. SpaceX has been more technically successful, but that means when Musk misbehaved — whether it was by smoking weed, making unapproved launches, polluting, or whatever — there was nothing the government could really do to him. They needed his rockets too badly. I think at this point we can all agree the Commercial Crew Program was an important failure point for American democracy, propping up Musk’s SpaceX for so long that Musk could steal Americans’ most sensitive data, wreak havoc on Social Security, and use Twitter, now X, to recruit an unknown number of baby mamas.

Blue Origin, meanwhile, has barely stayed in the running. The company has been around for 20 years now, was awarded just $25.6 million by Commercial Crew in exploratory grants, and its first heavy-lift launch of the New Glenn, the kind of rocket that sends up satellites and equipment, happened in January of this year. None of its known planned launches are meant for people at all. And while the launch cadence is ambitious for a new rocket, the company is still lagging SpaceX — while primarily doing little jaunts to indulge Bezos’ and Sanchez’s vanity.

So against this backdrop, Blue Origin’s space tourism seems espeically silly, particularly with a rumored price tag of $28 million per seat. (Dennis Tito paid $20 million to spend several days aboard the ISS in 2001, by the way, so Blue Origin’s trip seems much less cool than the one from more than 20 years ago.) The New Shepherd flew up to just barely what we call space, remaining strictly suborbital. It’s probably pretty cool to see Earth from beyond the Kármán Line for 11 minutes — I would take that ride if someone offered it to me — but it’s not, you know, groundbreaking. It’s not even groundbreaking for Blue Origin; Bezos was on the first human mission, along with some other dudes.

You can see the marketing logic of saving women for later: first crew (just coincidentally all men, I’m sure), then first all-female crew. Great for marketing. Two big firsts. But the you-go-girl rhetoric feels odd next to the government’s anti-woman stance; actual astronauts and other women in leadership are being literally erased from NASA’s history. Hey, you know who was at the inauguration of the guy who’s responsible for that? Oh yeah, Blue Origin honcho Jeff Bezos. I mean, Bezos dictated a $1 million payoff to the guy whose goons took down pictures of women in science. Amazon is also paying $40 million for the privilege of a documentary about Melania Trump, helmed by Brett Ratter, who’s been accused of sexual misconduct and rape.

And on top of that, the reason Sanchez was aboard the Blue Origin flight is that she’s literally fucking the boss. What a breakthrough for feminism, am I right, girls?

Broadcaster Gayle King, who joined Sanchez and Perry on the New Shepherd, has been touchy about the backlash. “My question is, have y’all been to space? Go to space or go to Blue Origin and see what they do and then come back and say, ‘This is a terrible thing,’” she said. Baby, I’d love to, but I make a normal amount of money, so I can’t do space tourism, and NASA’s entire astronaut thing is in serious jeopardy. King’s “let-them-eat-cake” moment is particularly jarring when you consider that the economy is on the rocks thanks to idiotic tariffs, inflation is on the rise, and de-dollarization is the order of the day. But hey, who’s surprised by a tone-deaf rich lady?

It isn’t just King feeling touchy. Perry is now beefing with Wendy’s — that’s right, the fast food joint — over a couple of mean tweets. Perry’s camp is attempting to use People to demand an apology.

The thing is, King, Perry, and the rest aren’t the real villains here. They got taken for a ride. The problem is Bezos, who’s play-acting at doing something worthwhile to — what? Impress his girlfriend? Pretend he’s a cowboy? Pose as being somehow better than Musk? It seems like if Bezos wanted to make a difference, he could be using his vast influence to fight the destruction of NASA. Instead, he’s playing with his toys.

Whatever is going on here, it’s not working. Even a nation that loves nothing better than falling for spectacle isn’t biting on this one. Maybe it’s just that Perry is in her flop era and she poisoned the well; maybe it’s that Sanchez, entertaining as she is, has the worst media instincts I’ve ever seen. Or maybe it’s that some of us have gotten really tired of performative feminism even as abortion rights have been vaporized and access to birth control is increasingly threatened. Maybe it’s just that no one’s rooting for Bezos or his companies. One way or the other, the all-female space tourists have turned into the butt of a cosmic joke.