Blue Origins plans all female spaceflights, but astronaut memoirs reveal the cost of being exceptional

For the first time since the solo flight of Russian astronaut Valentina Teleskova in 1963, the spacecraft enters orbit only women. The Blue Origin all-female spaceflight crew, including Popstar Katy Perry, are scheduled to take off this spring.

Jeff Bezos’ crew is gathered from successful and well-known women, including television presenter Gale King, producer Kellian Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bow, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and journalist Lauren Sanchez. Flight promotional materials claim Perry “hopes her journey will encourage her daughter and others to reach for the stars literally, figuratively.”

The attractive optics of this spaceflight are likely designed to encourage women to strive for their dreams. Shiny stories tell others that they can become like these extraordinary women. But behind this ambitious ideal is more problematic talk about successful women in science and their role in public.

In my doctoral studies, I look at memoirs written by female astronauts. They construct attractive portrayals of successful and exceptional women. But in reality, their success stories are not impossible for ordinary women to emulate.

This is typical of astronaut Katherine Coleman’s response to wearing a spacesuit designed for men. In her 2024 memoir, she wrote:

As this quote shows, women who travel to space tend to build themselves, as they deny the norms of what is expected of them and work so hard to offset systemic bias.

From the beginning of her memoir, Coleman emphasizes that she must always be an “exception” from the rest of humanity. But she also consistently suggests that her life was destined in this way. “The space felt like home to me,” she said, implicitly admitting that she was always there.

Jemison, the first African-American woman in the universe, also expressed this sense of destiny in her 2001 memoir. “I sat quietly and looked out the window on the flight deck,” she wrote. “It’s strange, but I always knew I was here. Looking down, looking down, looking around me, looking at the Earth, the moon, the stars, I felt like I belonged.”

The crew set up to board the Blue Origin Flight wants to be storytellers just as female astronauts are in the memoirs. But the well-known members of its crew remind us that hard work is just part of this particular story.

Eileen Collins was the first woman to pilot and order the space shuttle. In her 2021 memoir, she details the pressure and expectations of working in a male-dominated field. She discovered that it exacerbated the need to properly execute already tricky decisions and important actions.

When she says, “Current and future female pilots are counting on me to do the perfect job here,” she exemplifies the harsh scrutiny that female astronauts are often targeted when they are the first of their gender.

Behind the cover

The problem with popular scientific memoirs is that they are consistently sold as honest and true works. These books promise to reveal who the astronauts are in fact, but in fact they are carefully curated images of the women they painted.

So, they intend to motivate and inspire others, but memoirs don’t always do that in a completely honest way. This is drawn parallel to the blue origin flight.

Many of these stories also serve as responses to modern appetites to memoirs that rewrite scientists’ past stereotypes and reveal the internal emotional world of the subject. For example, Kathryn Sullivan discusses the innate “bread” and “wrestling” of pain inability to launch her mission due to technical issues.

This concept reflects why there is a passionate public expectation that Blue Origin’s flight crew embark on a perspective-changing journey and experiences “deep emotions from space.”

The current coverage surrounding the launch frames it as a celebration of the collective progress, but the people who make up this spaceflight crew do not reflect most women.

When a Blue Origin Mission uses female spaceflight as a measure of progress and becomes a roadster for a universal feminist story, it should be considered in conjunction with discrepancies and uniqueness in women’s experiences. Ultimately, it is important to move away from the narrative that informs that science, spaceflight, and success are synonymous with fame and exceptionalism.

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