“A bonafide frigging flight”: How NS-31 broke spaceflight norms and created an online uproarby Deana L. Weibel
|
| The flight seems to have opened up a conversation online—especially in social media—about who gets to go into space and also who gets to interpret what spaceflight means. |
I was recently interviewed by Danish journalist Peter Harmsen about NASA stepping back from its commitment to put a woman and person of color on the Moon,[1] so these topics have definitely been on my mind. I told Harmsen that I hoped the cultural momentum at NASA, including its commitment to inclusion, would weather these changes, but I wasn’t sure how optimistic to be. At least NASA’s page about Eileen Collins still mentions that she was the first female space shuttle pilot and first woman to command a NASA mission.[2]
Blue Origin’s New Shepard-31 mission, an all-female journey to space that reached about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth—the Kármán line[3] —included singer Katy Perry and television host Gayle King among its passengers. Seeing this mission did not allay any of my concerns. It still felt wonderful, however, to be watching women do something new in terms of space travel and getting attention for it.
The NS-31 flight was a commercial flight, a form of space tourism. While many dismiss tourism, as an anthropologist I was interested in the way this particular flight differed from previous suborbital flights with paying customers: in particular, how emotional the participants were, how it fostered community among the spacefarers, and how deeply disruptive it was to the most common narratives about space exploration and even space tourism. The flight seems to have opened up a conversation online—especially in social media—about who gets to go into space and also who gets to interpret what spaceflight means.
I was (perhaps naively) surprised by the amount of anger I saw online, especially in the hours following the flight. Some of the critiques focused on the idea that Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are complicit with a new administration, a relationship that makes everything the private space company has done since seem especially suspicious. Other arguments claimed that the flight was nothing but a “stunt” designed to boost the careers of the celebrities involved and their entourages.[4] I’ll admit, it was hard to ignore the presence of Orlando Bloom, the Kardashians, and Oprah Winfrey at the launch site in West Texas, although it was clear that these celebrities were present to support their loved ones’ act of daring and bravery.
Certain criticisms, on the other hand, seemed a little strange, like claims that the flight hadn’t actually reached the Kármán line, even though official reports indicated that it had. A few social media users contended that the spacecraft’s suborbital trip was somehow not really “going into space.” This would have been a surprise to American astronaut Alan Shepard, who is usually credited with being the first American in space due to his suborbital flight on May 5, 1961.[5] It’s possible that there were similar critiques when William Shatner, Wally Funk, or Ed Dwight went into space, but I didn’t hear them quite as often and they didn’t seem quite so strident.
Part of the problem in the public reaction seems to be that the most famous member of the NS-31 crew, Katy Perry, is a pop star (only including Taylor Swift would have ignited more fury), someone who seems to have little to do with space or science, aside, perhaps from her 2011 single “E.T.” It’s also an issue for many that the crew (a controversial term in this context, but the one Blue Origin uses) was intentionally composed of six women—the first example of a flight that intentionally excluded men since Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 mission on Vostok 6. Tereshkova’s multi-day solo flight in the early days of space exploration was an incredible act of bravery that certainly dwarfs the quick suborbital journey of NS-31, but it’s telling that these two launches were separated by nearly 61 years. All crewed American flights until 1983 intentionally excluded women, and many afterward left women out incidentally. I looked at just Space Shuttle flights (from 1981 to 2011) and out of 135 missions, 91 were composed of all-male crews. That’s 67%. It took capitalism-based commercial spaceflight for an all-female crew to be assembled, and among just the Blue Origin crewed flights, only 1 in 11, or 9%, has had only women on board. But for many observers, the composition of the crew was less important than the perception that they hadn’t earned their place on board. Much of the ire centered less on the passengers’ identities than on the idea that they hadn't earned their seats—that they were merely space tourists masquerading as astronauts.
One of the most common critiques online—apart from the bafflingly ubiquitous voices claiming that humans have never been in space, or that space doesn’t exist (or who knows, maybe even that West Texas doesn’t exist)—is that the women on NS-31 didn’t qualify as “astronauts” and so didn’t deserve to fly. There’s a good point here. Initially, most of the people who traveled and worked on ships were considered sailors. Only later, when traveling by ship became something rich people did for leisure, did the idea of being a “passenger” on a boat take hold.[6]
| An all-female mission featuring people in the public eye like Katy Perry, Gayle King, and independent film producer Kerianne Flynn, all from a cultural background that’s more Hollywood than Annapolis and where expressiveness and connection are more important than discipline and emotional control, makes spaceflight into something entirely different. |
I have written previously about the term tourist, especially the idea of the “space tourist,” and have discussed how people who have participated in commercial spaceflights tend to replace this term with something like spaceflight participant. These spacefarers often conduct research onboard spacecraft or perform other duties in a way that distinguishes them from being a “mere tourist.” I have argued in my work that a similar distinction exists between so-called “serious” spaceflight participants and “shallow” space tourists.[7] It is accurate to say, then, that most of the passengers on board NS-31 were primarily traveling into space for touristic reasons, looking at the Earth from space the way a visitor to Arizona might take in the Grand Canyon (Gayle King, post-touchdown, however, emphasized the training the team had received, insisting that it hadn’t just been a “ride,” but a “bonafide frigging flight.”) Amanda Nguyen and Aisha Bowe, however, both with strong space science backgrounds, took scientific experiments with them into space,[8] moving them from tourists into the category of “spaceflight participants” and connecting them to the dozens of payload specialists who have flown on NASA missions. But legitimacy in space isn’t only judged by what you do—it’s also shaped by how you behave, especially if you’re a woman.
In my work as an anthropologist, I have interviewed multiple women who have flown in space. Different female astronauts have had different experiences, but space shuttle astronaut “Cara” (a pseudonym I use to protect her privacy), emphasized that being a woman in what had previously been an overwhelmingly masculine situation put a lot of pressure on her. She was afraid any errors she made would reflect not just on her but on all women astronauts and she didn’t want to hurt the reputations or opportunities of other women in her field.
She explained the rather joyless perspective that resulted: “I'm not going to make a mistake. I am focused like a laser. I'm doing this job perfectly because of that. I didn't really enjoy my flights as much as I think I could have. I mean, if I went along as a passenger, I would've had a really great time, but I was working and I was focused and I was constantly thinking what’s next, what’s next on the flight plan.” Women who flew later might not have been under as much pressure, but Cara felt that all eyes were on her.
Thinking over my discussion with Cara now I have two main insights: The first is that I doubt any male astronaut believed that a mistake he made would reflect poorly on all men. The second is a sense of surprise that only a few decades later a group of women went into space and absolutely had the “really great time” Cara missed. There have long been rules about which women are let into “male domains” and which women are excluded. Research into another work area dominated by men, sports broadcasting, suggests that women broadcasters must fit into a “cool sportsgirl” archetype, gaining male approval “through adopting masculine-coded traits, such as sports knowledge and smack talk.”[9]
Space culture has been studied far less, but most of the female astronauts I’ve interviewed had a military background, another “masculine-coded” area where they would have learned to behave in a certain way that allowed them to (usually) be accepted as “one of the guys.” An all-female mission featuring people in the public eye like Katy Perry, Gayle King, and independent film producer Kerianne Flynn, all from a cultural background that’s more Hollywood than Annapolis and where expressiveness and connection are more important than discipline and emotional control, makes spaceflight into something entirely different. For me, this difference didn’t just represent a shift in tone—it pointed to a deeper transformation in what spaceflight could mean.
In the field of cultural anthropology, a lot has been written about a similar “serious versus shallow” distinction between pilgrims—those who travel to sacred places like Mecca, Jerusalem, or Bodh Gaya for religious reasons—and tourists. Both pilgrims and tourists tend to believe that a pilgrim has valid reasons to travel, while a tourist, somewhat guiltily, participates in frivolous activity. Although many members of the general public assume that space exploration is a purely scientific endeavor, when I began interviewing astronauts (in 2004!) it became very clear, very quickly, that many astronauts are deeply religious. For some, space travel is a chance to pursue spiritual experiences and transformation. Astronauts I have interviewed have read scripture in space, meditated, prayed during missions, taken communion, and had their religious beliefs shaken, changed, or strengthened by what they’ve seen in space.[10] In my first article for The Space Review, I specifically compared pilgrimage to space exploration.[11]
When I look at NS-31 through the lens of someone who has studied pilgrimage and tourism since 1995, there are aspects of it that—like certain ISS missions—align beautifully with what is seen in pilgrimage. When pilgrims make a voyage, they most often go to a location that is considered sacred. The expectation is that the site is linked to the supernatural in some way or has intense power, either spiritually or symbolically, compared to normal everyday locations. Pilgrims expect to be transformed when they visit these sacred places and often say they feel the power of something stronger than they are—something they can’t quite understand.
The ethnographic record—by which I mean all of the data anthropologists have gathered about people living on this planet—demonstrates that the sky, the stars, the Moon, and other celestial objects often have deep religious significance. The Earth itself is also understood to be a source of life or, in many traditions, to be a deity itself. It does not take a leap of imagination to understand how going into the sky—especially going into outer space—may be seen as travel to a powerful, difficult-to-understand location.
Astronauts of different religions, and even agnostic and atheist astronauts, have described the awe they felt from gazing into space or looking back down at the Earth in what Frank White called the “Overview Effect.”[12] It’s not a universal feeling, but it seems to occur more often than not. What people experience in outer space—and what they expect from outer space—is very similar to what pilgrims feel they gain from being baptized in the Jordan River, following Muhammad’s path at Mecca, or meditating under the Bodhi tree where the Buddha himself is said to have gained enlightenment. Anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner described pilgrimage sites as tears in the veil that separates normal life from the supernatural. People feel closer to the divine in these places and feel themselves changed by the experience.[13]
| As the six passengers in NS-31 rose toward the Kármán line, one of them could be heard through the audio broadcast exclaiming, “Oh my Goddess!” You can bet people on social media were angry about this as well. |
As I said, not everybody who visits space has spiritual or religious experiences, but the potential seems to be there, with some astronauts taking advantage of it more than others. An astronaut I refer to in my work as “Theo” has argued that being in space, among galaxies you can see with your naked eye, is the best place for spiritual experience, for instance. Even less religious astronauts sometimes have deep thoughts about infinity during extravehicular activities, as they stare into more space than they can ever comprehend. As “Ben,” a not particularly religious astronaut, told me about one of his spacewalks: “I’m ten or twenty miles above the Earth, nothing below me except the Earth. And I'm hanging on by a thumb and a forefinger and looking over my shoulder thinking, looking across—not at the Earth, but past the Earth…I’m in this very, very unique position where there’s nothing. The first time of my life there was nothing—looking not up but across—between me and the visible universe and just being amazed I had the opportunity to be in that spot.”
For even the most scientifically inclined, the reality of outer space can be humbling and overpowering. For the more spiritually inclined, it can feel like visiting heaven or another unearthly realm. After all, outer space is literally an unearthly realm. If we accept that the more spiritually inclined spacefarers may be quite ready to have a spiritual experience in space, this raises the question of what types of spiritual experiences are appropriate in space. Based on my interviews, there’s a lot of variety.
Anthropologists who study pilgrimage to sacred places sometimes observe sites that are “contested.” This means that people of different religious traditions consider the site to be sacred, but often for very different reasons, leading to tension. Jerusalem, for example, is the location of the remaining Western Wall of the Temple of Solomon, a deeply spiritual place in Judaism. For Christians, it is where Jesus walked, preached, and where he was crucified and resurrected. For Muslims, it is where Muhammad ascended to Heaven, after he was miraculously transported to the Dome of the Rock during his Night Journey. All three of these very closely related traditions consider Jerusalem to be extremely religiously important, but they don’t agree on the reasons for that significance, and this has led to conflict for more than 1,000 years. Is it possible that outer space could become contested religious space?
I have heard Christian astronauts tell me excitedly about seeing the Earth from God’s perspective, noticing images in the Earth’s geography that seem like Easter eggs waiting for astronauts to find, or personally authenticating Bible passages about the Earth hanging in nothing or the shape of the “circle of the Earth.”[14] Astronaut Jeff Hoffman famously took a Torah into space and read from it in orbit over Israel.[15] Russian Orthodox astronauts keep icons in their section of the International Space Station, including images of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, Russian Orthodox patriarchs, and Yuri Gagarin.[16]
The all-women crew of Blue Origin’s April 2025 spaceflight spoke frequently about religion and spirituality both before launch and after reentry. Katy Perry was struck by the use of a feather on the New Shepard spacecraft and the association of the passenger capsule with a tortoise, noting that both feather and tortoise were nicknames her mother gave her.[17] Perry also noted that during the flight her Pentecostal mother had been “speaking in tongues.” Gayle King brought items she believed would “protect” her, including a wooden cross given to her by someone who knew she was a nervous airplane passenger. Aisha Bowe brought a star representing her deceased father.[18] Bringing important religious or symbolic objects on journeys to sacred places (or to space) is extremely common and one of the strongest parallels between pilgrimage and spaceflight. There are other parallels as well. Sites like Lourdes, a pilgrimage center in France, are associated with healing. Amanda Nguyen sought healing from sexual violence through her journey to space.[19]
As the six passengers in NS-31 rose toward the Kármán line, one of them could be heard through the audio broadcast exclaiming, “Oh my Goddess!”[20] You can bet people on social media were angry about this as well. This particular reframing of what had heretofore been marked by many NASA astronauts as a specifically Judeo-Christian sacred place into something more neopagan was very familiar to me. My dissertation research site of Rocamadour, France, is a 1,000-year-old Catholic pilgrimage shrine with a very long history of Christian use. When I began researching the shrine in the late 20th century, I discovered fairly quickly that Rocamadour was being reinterpreted and used in novel ways by Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, and what were then called “New Age” spiritual seekers, all focused on the site’s purported pre-Christian history as a location where a powerful goddess had been worshiped. I remember the nuns at Rocamadour telling me they would sometimes have to chase the “seekers” out of the chapel when they did inappropriate things there, like chanting or praying to the cliff face that made up the fourth wall of the church. Whoever yelled “Oh my Goddess!” in NS-31 was committing a similar transgression.
We can imagine, however, that the exclamation “Oh my Goddess!” may have been said as one of the women looked down at the Earth below her. The idea that the Earth itself is a goddess stretches back into antiquity, with Indigenous traditions around the world worshiping Earth goddesses or seeing the Earth itself as Mother Earth. Even some astronauts hold this perspective.
In 2024, I attended an event in New York where retired Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart was receiving the Legendary Explorers Award from the Explorers Club. I was somewhat surprised to hear him express the idea that the Earth was the mother of humanity. Schweickart explained a concept he called cosmic birth, which framed human spaceflight as something similar to a baby being born: leaving a profound source of warmth and nutrition for the cold reality outside. He said that humanity’s ability to leave Earth allowed us to truly love it like a mother. He explained, “Before birth, it’s all one way; Mom’s doing everything. But after birth, we begin to recognize Mom… and the love flows two ways.”
Schweickart’s metaphor connects to a wide range of understandings of the human relationship with the Earth, from Indigenous religions to the Cosmism of Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky[21] to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.[22] Like many astronauts, Schweickart’s experiences in space had a profound effect on him, influencing the way he thought about humanity’s place in the universe. Occasionally I’ll come across the view that space exploration must be purely scientific, free from the kinds of spiritual or symbolic thinking that leads to divisiveness. I find, however, that religion and space exploration are, in fact, so tightly interwound that sometimes religious ideas are mistaken for secular ones.
During his second inauguration on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump—clearly influenced by his advisor Elon Musk—made the comment that during his term, “…we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Musk is reported to have applauded enthusiastically in response.
| I find, however, that religion and space exploration are, in fact, so tightly interwound that sometimes religious ideas are mistaken for secular ones. |
The idea of manifest destiny, although likely meant in a secular way by Donald Trump, has its roots in the American form of Protestantism. During the 19th century, it came to represent the belief that God had chosen North America as the homeland of white settlers—and that all the settler population had to do was move west and take what was rightfully theirs. The story of manifest destiny was meant to show the righteousness of westward expansion, while ignoring the displacement of Indigenous American populations, the spread of disease, and the colossal loss of life that resulted. The impact of this belief on America’s Tribal Nations continues to resonate.
In the mid-20th century, the appeal of moving forward into “empty” space—echoing the fantasy associated with the United States’ continuous search for “elbow room”—was seamlessly transferred to space itself. This is why Captain Kirk (played by another rather emotive Blue Origin space tourist, William Shatner[23] ) referred in his opening monologue to space as the “final frontier.”[24] Many people drawn to that idea seem unaware of its supernatural implications when they embrace the notion of manifest destiny while also insisting on the need to separate religious ideas from space exploration. Instead, it’s seen as visionary—something beyond religion. In reality, both “manifest destiny” in space and beliefs about the Earth being a goddess are religious in nature, with neither holding logical superiority over the other.
One of the commentators of the Blue Origin NS-31 flight was Kristin Fisher, the daughter of pioneering female astronaut Anna Fisher. Anna Fisher was widely known—at least before the forced changes to the way federal agencies tell our history—as the first mother in space. During the broadcast, Kristin Fisher talked about her mother having been assigned to her initial spaceflight while still pregnant.
The theme of motherhood continued throughout the broadcast, with Katy Perry bringing a daisy into space to represent her daughter Daisy, and Gayle King floating a toy belonging to her grandchild. The whole thing was such an interesting break in the typical narrative of space exploration as conquest, colonization, and bending the Moon, Mars, or asteroids to human will in the name of commerce. Instead, the metaphor of birth and kinship held sway. The spacefarers referred to each other as sisters, and Perry and King even kissed the Earth—their symbolic mother—when their capsule returned to the ground.
During their post-flight interviews, four of the women began to cry. I watched with curiosity as an alternative way of understanding space exploration seemed to manifest on my computer screen. Many members of the public who observed or heard about the flight were pleased with it, but they seemed outnumbered by the legions who saw the whole thing as a violation of one kind or another—a rupture in what space exploration is meant to be.
I consider myself an observer. I study the American space community as a culture, the way a traditional anthropologist might study small villages or isolated populations. There has been one dominant way of understanding space exploration for decades in this culture—one forged by America’s Puritan history, military academies, and the Cold War. It wasn’t apparent during the flight of NS-31.
So the whole thing may have been a publicity stunt. It may have been billionaire Jeff Bezos trying to improve his reputation and distract from his questionable decisions in other areas. It may have been a wild indulgence by rich celebrities looking for something interesting to do, or a way to promote their latest projects. It may have been a shallow feel-good moment at a time when scientists are being stripped of funding and legitimacy. It was probably all of those things. But it was also moving.
| Many members of the public who observed or heard about the flight were pleased with it, but they seemed outnumbered by the legions who saw the whole thing as a violation of one kind or another—a rupture in what space exploration is meant to be. |
I was impressed to hear Lauren Sanchez talk about how Bezos—her fiancé, who had flown in Blue Origin’s first crewed suborbital flight—wanted her to have the experience of floating in space.[25] I was moved when the women returned, triumphant, bursting with tears and laughter. I saw subtle transformation in the way that space tourism was being carried out and was fascinated. I love to watch new directions in culture and see how traditions can change.
Driving home from work, I called my husband to discuss the New Shepard-31 flight. He commented cynically on the way Jeff Bezos had hugged Lauren Sanchez upon her return—a hug that he thought seemed rehearsed for the camera.
“Oh,” I asked him, “how long would you hug me if I had just returned safely from space?” He paused for a couple of seconds. “Touché,” he finally answered.
The flight of Blue Origin NS-31 was not only a cynical distraction from the censoring of stories of accomplishments by women and members of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States. It 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. It was also an act of bravery and a showcase for a number of different types of love. People on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Reddit were understandably furious. After all, it was our first—and perhaps will be our only—glimpse of what space travel could look like under a new model of human expansion into space, one in which the expression of stereotypically “feminine” (and traditionally taboo) emotions like sentimentality, joy, pleasure, and gratitude would not be seen as forbidden and frivolous, but as absolutely essential to our species’ ascent to the stars. Totally unacceptable.
EndnotesNote: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.
