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El Burdo -> RE: Blue Origin Rocket with Six Bimbos (Apr. 16 2025 16:23:49)
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This is a section from an article in today's Guardian in the UK.
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/15/blue-origin-flight-american-feminism)
Blue Origin itself is a product of state abandonment of space exploration. Founded in 2000 to fill the void left by the federal government’s effort to privatize the work of agencies like Nasa, Blue Origin has long been a pet project of Bezos, who was almost the sole funder of the company in its early years. Focused on tourism, rather than scientific inquiry, the company is best known for its slow technological development in comparison with its main competitor, SpaceX (another space tourism vehicle, launched by the Trump adviser and mega-donor Elon Musk); for the giggle-inducing obscene look of its rockets; and for its periodic publicity stunt flights featuring celebrities (William Shatner has also taken the ride). Bezos’s Amazon donated $1m to Trump’s most recent inauguration, and he intervened during the 2024 election to stop the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, from endorsing Kamala Harris; the Trump administration, for its part, just awarded Blue Origin a contract worth more than $2bn.
Once, Nasa was the pride of the American experiment: a testament to how a society dedicated to legal equality and passionate hard work could expand the horizons of human possibility. Now, Blue Origin is a testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok. Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic. The Blue Origin flight does not make me feel like humanity will reach new heights of achievement. It makes me feel like everything that is coming is grimly predictable, tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth.
But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man. (The fact that the rocket itself looks so phallic does not help to lessen the flight’s message that the surest way for women to raise themselves in the world is to attach themselves to a man.)
There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur whose past work with Nasa makes her something closer to an actual astronaut. But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness.
In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women, and particularly women of color, in Stem. (The Trump administration has forced Nasa to close some offices in order to comply with its ban on the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that would recruit such candidates.) But mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said, bizarrely. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
At least, Viva Harvard. (57B$?? can this be true)
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