Art by Anya Rasmussen

Six celebrity women made history aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. On April 14 they became the first all-female, non-solo civilian crew to experience zero gravity.

The 11-minute suborbital flight included celebrities from a range of industries: pop star Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, activist Amanda Nguyen, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, and pilot and journalist Lauren Sánchez, who is also engaged to Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

Junior Kishor Rajmohan, president of the Astronomy Club and an aspiring aerospace engineer, said the public attention surrounding the celebrity passengers could help spark a broader awareness about spaceflight.

“The buzz, especially about a pop star going into space, is really helpful in getting a lot of people to start focusing on space flight and start believing that what NASA’s doing is actually important and this is part of the future,” Rajmohan said “This is a big part of the advertising we need to do and the marketing we need to do around space and spaceflight — talking about how important this is and encouraging people to support it.”

In a show of flair, Sánchez partnered with designers from the fashion brand Monse to design custom space suits for the flight. The tailored blue suits featured optional flared leggings and practical storage pockets, optimizing both function and fashion.

This mission follows only one other all-female spaceflight: Soviet Valentina Tereshkova’s historic solo voyage in 1963. Rajmohan said he hopes this uniquely all-female flight will inspire more women and girls to be interested in space.

“Blue Origin is really making history with this all-women crew and commercialized spaceflight,” Rajmohan said.

However, the mission was not without controversy. Critics declared the flight as a publicity stunt, pointing to the exclusivity of the wealthy celebrities onboard and the flight’s negative environmental impact.

Physics and Astrophysics teacher Josh Bloom said private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have sparked a new rush of commercial, rather than political, space travel.

“At this point, flights like these have largely become publicity stunts with little scientific value,” Bloom said in an email to The Campanile. “Instead, it is demonstrating that we’ve gotten to the point where we can send relatively untrained, non-professional passengers into space and return them safely to Earth.”

Bloom said he recognizes the criticism of these flights handing billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos more money — NASA’s mission doesn’t cover commercial space flight, so all space tourism falls on private companies. However, Bloom said this increase in space tourism also provides benefits.

“I think as human beings, we have an innate drive to explore and experience something new,” Bloom said in an email. “But more so, we have a drive to expand our perspective and see and feel more deeply a largely picture of which we are all apart and to which we all belong … I deeply believe that perspective is in many respects our salvation as a species, and if more of us have the opportunity to gain it, the better off we all are.”

And Rajmohan said the environmental impact of these commercialized space flights is so insignificant, critics should instead be focusing on the normalized activities exacerbating climate change.

“There are a lot more pressing environmental issues than the few people getting to experience space flight,” Rajmohan said. “This isn’t something we’re doing randomly. This is integral to what we’re going to be doing in the future.”

Simone D’Amico, Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford, agrees.

“At this moment, suborbital flights by Blue Origin are done on such a small scale that the environmental impact is not a matter of concern at all,” D’Amico said. “When this scales up, and we’re talking about 1 million people (going to space) in a shorter time frame, that’s a completely different scale and then we have to be careful about assessing the environmental impact of this kind of flight.”

In addition, D’Amico said increased commercial flights could lead to valuable research on the physiological and psychological effects of spaceflight.

“From a science perspective, this will obviously become extremely important when more and more data is collected for a long amount of time, because we need to understand how bones, how muscle, how the heart, how our organs, how our brain, how they react to a long exposure to space and what can we do to make this feasible for human space flight,” D’Amico said. “One of the impacts of this commercialization of space flight is to have more research in that direction.”

D’Amico also said he cautions against treating space as an infinite resource and hopes harsher guidelines and behavioral standards will be enforced in space.

“Many people don’t recognize that we are having an environmental impact on space due to the rapid proliferation of satellites, similar to our oceans and atmosphere,” D’Amico said. “In the same way, we should not be allowed to simply pollute space — it is extremely dangerous and can jeopardize access to space for generations to come.”

As more celebrities potentially make their debut in zero-gravity, the future accessibility of civilian space tourism still hangs in the air, with many wondering when they will get their chance. D’Amico said the growth of commercial flights will come just as he had always anticipated, yet it will decrease the rare and special aspects of space.

“We are experiencing a so-called democratization of space, where space becomes more accessible to people who are not professionally trained astronauts and require only a few days of training, especially for suborbital flights,,” D’Amico said. “I am one of the people with a dream of space flight and scientific inquiry: satisfying the curiosity of humankind exploration and answering fundamental questions which inevitably bring us to space and to expanding humankind to space.”

Despite the current brevity of these flights — barely passing the Kármán line, the boundary at 100 kilometers separating Earth’s atmosphere from space — D’Amico, Rajmohan and Bloom said they would gladly accept the opportunity to experience space and the famed overview effect, a cognitive shift experienced after observing Earth from space.

“The overview effect is that special effect that astronauts feel when they see the Earth, the full disc, they see the curvature of the earth, and they see themselves as outside of the planet,” D’Amico said. “There is a psychological effect of unifying, observing the Earth from outside and how fragile and special it is.”

D’Amico said the overview effect is even more impactful when one spends a longer period of time viewing the Earth from outside space. He thinks commercial flights will shift more toward orbital flights, where the flight has enough velocity to actually orbit around the Earth making full circles, rather than the more accessible suborbital flights which make a parabola-shaped arc up to zero-gravity and then back down.

Looking ahead, experts say commercial space travel could help prepare humanity for a time when life beyond Earth becomes necessary. Rajmohan said these advancements, despite the backlash, have great importance.

“Space is really part of the future,” Rajmohan said. “What Blue Origin is doing with commercialization and making (commercial spaceflight) more accessible … is very interesting and is going to be very impactful.”