#1: Women in Space: When Progress Becomes Performance

What the all-female Blue Origin flight reveals about power, performance, and patriarchy in space.

Sunita Williams spent 286 unplanned days onboard the International Space Station (ISS), returning in March 2025, after a fault developed on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Helen Sharman trained in Star City, Russia during the Cold War, before spending 7 days on board Mir space station. Both these women are trailblazers: scientists, astronauts, icons. Meanwhile, Katy Perry is “putting the ‘ass' back into astronaut”.

Credit: Blue Origin

Let’s be clear: the all-female Blue Origin crew were not astronauts — they were space tourists. According to the global treaty that governs the activity of nations in outer space, astronauts are defined as ‘envoys of humankind’. But the underlying message of this publicity stunt — a pet project of Jeff Bezos — is clear: women belong in space, so long as their make-up is fixed.

The symbolism of this event is not lost on me. An all-female crew launched aboard a giant phallic rocket, with just the tip touching the edge of space, before plunging back to the depths of Mother Earth. The 21st-century ‘space race’ isn’t about exploration or human progress: instead, it has become a dick-waving contest for the tech-bro billionaires — men who seek to dominate everything and everyone, no matter the cost.

I’m deeply disappointed.

It was an opportunity to celebrate genuine female achievement. The crew included Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist, first Bahamian in space and first Black woman to fly with Blue Origin. I imagine this was a dream come true for her. Arguably she was the most deserving member of this crew to go to space. And yet she has been pushed to the margins — in a moment that echoes the Trump administration’s erasure of DEI across federal agencies, including NASA.

Instead we get a series of mixed messages, perpetuated by the more famous members of the crew in interviews before and after the trip:

• “We’re here to inspire the next generation of girls…” whilst Perry unironically exclaims “I wish I could take glam up there with me”.

• “It’s about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging…” (Perry) … by flying on an 11-minute joyride designed and controlled by men, with no real astronaut training.

• “The Earth is profound, let’s protect it…” (Sánchez) … whilst ignoring the environmental cost of burning rocket fuel for a vanity project.

• “We’re all in this together…” (Sánchez) … yet billionaires have a habit of being exempt from the existential crises the rest of us face: climate collapse, inequality, food insecurity, poverty.

• “I am so proud of me right now…” (King) … casually sidestepping Armstrong’s reflection on space flight as a collective achievement for humanity, not a personal ego trip.

This is what struck me this week. For all the progress we think we’re making as women in a patriarchal society, it often feels surface-level. We can have our IWD panels, pay gap reports and seats at the table — but don’t expect the table itself to change. We’re allowed to lead, but only if we assimilate. We’re invited in, so long as we don’t ask the system to restructure itself to accommodate us.

Sexism hasn’t disappeared: it’s evolved.

It no longer shows up in explicit exclusion; it hides within curated empowerment campaigns, carefully managed photo ops and branding exercises that appear progressive but fail to challenge the underlying power structures effectively.

In a society that privileges the individual over the collective, power works by turning us into our own regulators. As Foucault argued, biopower manages populations not through force, but through norms, by shaping how we understand ourselves, our bodies, and our place in the world. Women in particular have become highly skilled at this self-policing. Governments and media do not need to control us directly through force and coercion: they only need to show us what is acceptable, desirable, aspirational — and we will do the rest ourselves.

But then again, maybe the system is changing.

Maybe what we’re witnessing now is the backlash. The pendulum swings towards progress — and power panics. The old guard tightens its grip in desperation, repackaging control as empowerment, and calls it inclusion.

Perhaps this tension is a sign that something is breaking open — that the system is starting to buckle under the weight of its own inequality?

This is why it’s important to remember the women who have made real contributions to space science: Williams, Sharman, Ride, Jemison, Collins, Whitson, Koch, Meir, Epps, Yang, and over 100 more. They are not props: they are scientists, engineers, doctors and leaders.

If we want to support the next generation of women in STEM—not just show them in space, but help them actually get there—we need to shift our focus. Away from spectacle and performance, towards the slow, often invisible work of creating equitable systems: education, access, mentorship, funding, recognition.

Representation only matters when it challenges the status quo of inequitable power dynamics within society. I long to see another all-female crew, but this time not as a PR stunt for a billionaire who needs an image transplant. Rather, I want the next crew to represent womanhood not as performance, but as the expression of human potentiality: what we might become when we are free to be ourselves.