Space Babes Survived 11-Minute Trip
In September of 1985 I flew with the Blue Angels. I wore a flight suit and was even allowed to briefly take the controls during the flight.
But mainly, I had one job: To refrain from vomiting.
I am proud to say I was successful.
Yet I never claimed to be a Navy pilot. And I didn’t kiss the earth when we landed back at Oceana NAS.
That sets me apart from the glam gang that flew on a Jeff Bezos tourism rocket on Monday. The Blue Origin celebrity babes were actually referred to as “crew.”
“Blue Origin Launches Katy Perry, All-Female Crew Into Space” read the headlines almost everywhere.
Hilarious.
They weren’t crew. They were cargo.
And they didn’t go into space.
The six women, which included Bezos’ flamboyant intended, Lauren Sanchez, Oprah’s bestie Gayle King, pop star Katy Perry and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen traveled 62 miles to the “threshold of space” and then parachuted back to earth.
Basically, they did what Laika the Soviet space dog did in 1957, only the canine cooked in her capsule and the girls were returned to earth safely.
The passengers paid an estimated $200,000 to $300,000 each for an 11- minute trip into lower space where they worried constantly about how they looked.
“Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry predicted, according to Yahoo News. “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
“We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!” Sánchez said
Instead of suiting up in shapeless spacesuits, Sanchez commissioned designers from Oscar de la Renta to come up with something sexy for the “crew.”
“I think the suits are elegant, but they also bring a little spice to space,” Sanchez told The New York Times.
“Simplicity was important, and comfort, and fit,” the designer said. “But we also wanted something that was a little dangerous, like a motocross outfit. Or a ski suit. Flattering and sexy.”
As expected, Sanchez managed to show off her décolletage in her spacesuit.
Once they returned to earth, the women gushed about their experience.
Training?
According to news reports these astro-celebs had two days of training that consisted mainly of learning how to enter and leave the capsule, fasten their seatbelts and get into their skin-tight spacesuits.
Look, it’s one thing for the super-rich to splurge on the ultimate girls’ getaway. It’s quite another for the media to pretend they were breaking barriers for women. We already have female astronauts. They are highly skilled women who spend years preparing to go into space. They wear unflattering suits and don’t worry about how their hair looks, as evidenced by Suni Williams wild ‘do.
Flying for about 10 minutes in an automated rocket ship with your super-rich girlfriends, in matching designer clothes, may get their hearts pumping, but it did nothing but provide much-needed comic relief to those of us here on earth.
