Blue Origin plans an all-female space flight—but astronaut memoirs reveal the cost of being exceptional

First time after Russian cosmonott Valentina Tareskova single flight In 1963, a spacecraft will enter the classroom only with rider women. Blue Origin’s All-Female Space Flight CrewWhich includes popstar Katy Perry is ready to remove this spring.

The crew of Jeff Bezos has been gathered from successful and famous women, including television presenter GAIL King, producer Carian Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Guyen and journalist Lauren Sanchaz. Flight promotional materialsPerry claims that Perry “hopes her journey encourages her daughter and others to reach the stars, literally and rhetorical.”

The glamorous optics of this spaceflight are designed to encourage women to try for their dreams. The bright story tells others that they can be like these extraordinary women. Nevertheless, behind this aspiring ideal, there is a more problematic story about successful women in science and their roles in public.

My Ph.D. Research examines memoirs written by women astronauts. They create attractive depiction of women who are successful and extraordinary. But their success stories in practice are impossible for normal women to simulate.

It is an appetomized in astronaut Catherine Coleman The response to wearing spacesuit designed for men. In her 2024 memoir, she wrote: “Most of the time, I took the approach that if the suit was not fit, I would wear it anyway and wear it well. Wear it better than expected.”

As this quotation shows, women who have traveled to space make themselves, because they are exceptionally hard to deny the norms of being required and to compensate for systemic prejudices.

From the beginning of his memoir, Kolman insisted that he was always to be “exception” from the rest of humanity, which feels isolated. But she also constantly states that her life was decided in this way. “Space I felt like home,” she says, clearly accepting that she was always there to live there.

Jemisson, who was the first African American woman in space, also expressed this feeling of her fate 2001 memoir“I was looking out of the windows on the flight deck,” she writes. “Strange, but I always knew that I would be here. Look down and looking at the earth, moon and stars, I just felt as if I was related.”

Blue Origin wants to be a crew to ride in a flight Storytellers In the same way, female astronauts are in their memoir. But the famous members of its crew are a reminder that hard work is only part of this particular story-court and privilege also play a role.

Elele colins Pilot and a space shuttle was the first woman to take command of the shuttle. In her 2021 memoirs, she gives a description of pressure and expectations to work in the male-oriented field. He found that it already increases the need to make difficult decisions and to do important tasks correctly.

When she says “the current and future female pilots are counting to me to do an ideal work on me,” she gives an example of rigorous investigation that female astronauts are often subject to the first of their penis.

Behind the cover

The issue with popular scientific memoirs is that they are constantly marketed as honest and true tasks. These books promise to explain who the astronauts are really, but they are in fact, there are careful cure images of women they paint.

So when they intend to inspire and motivate others, memoirs do not always do so in a completely honest manner. It draws a parallel with a blue origin flight.

Many of these narratives want to re -write the previous stereotypes of scientists, while also serve as a reaction to contemporary hunger for memoirs that reveal the internal emotional world of their subjects. For example, Catherine Sulivan discusses “Wrestling” “pangs” with intestine Pain on being unable to start your mission due to technical issues.

This concept shows why a fever is public hope that the Blue Origin Flight Crew will look on a perspective-shift journey and experience “”Deep emotions from space.,

Whereas Current coverage The launch frame, making it a celebration of collective progress, does not reflect most women with this spaceflight crew.

If the Blue Origin Mission is to be a losar for a universal feminist narrative, it should also be considered as a way to use women’s spacecraft as a measure of progress, then it should also be considered in collaboration and uniqueness of women’s experiences. Ultimately, it is important to go away from stories that inform us that science, spaceflight and success are only synonymous with fame and extraordinaryness.

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