On 14 April 2025, six women boarded a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule at Launch Site One in West Texas and rode it past the Kármán line for ten minutes and twenty-one seconds. The crew — film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyễn, journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry, and Lauren Sánchez, the flight’s organiser and Jeff Bezos’s then-fiancée — comprised the first all-female spaceflight since Valentina Tereshkova flew solo on Vostok 6 in 1963. The capsule reached an apogee of 106 kilometres before parachuting back to the Texas desert. Perry kissed the ground. Bezos was there to greet them. The cultural backlash, by the time the capsule had landed, was already underway.
In the year since, the criticism has hardened into a consensus. The flight was treated as a vanity project; the framing of the mission as a feminist milestone was widely mocked. Lily Allen, Olivia Munn, Emily Ratajkowski and Amy Schumer all weighed in publicly. The fullest statement of the case came in an opinion piece in The Guardian by Moira Donegan, which characterised the mission as a “perverse funeral” for an America that once made space for both scientific advancement and feminist progress. Jessica Chastain reposted it. The US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went further, publicly arguing that the passengers did not qualify as astronauts under FAA criteria — a claim somewhat undercut by the fact that the FAA had formally ended its Commercial Space Astronaut Wings programme in December 2021, replacing it with a public list of everyone who had crossed 50 statute miles on an FAA-licensed launch.
The critics had the facts on their side. The flight was a luxury product, expensively produced, and the science it contributed was negligible. What the cultural argument never quite reckoned with is that this was not a failure of the mission; it was the mission. And the 30 January 2026 announcement that Blue Origin will pause the entire New Shepard programme for no less than two years — to shift resources, the company said, toward its human lunar capabilities — has quietly explained why that argument missed the point.
Blue Origin’s actual product was never transport. It was the experience of having been to space, sold to a narrowly defined customer base, in a market the marketing literature has come to identify as one of the purest expressions of what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore named, in their 1998 Harvard Business Review essay, the experience economy. A 2025 chapter in the Springer volume Selling the Stars: The Marketing Magic Behind Space Tourism traces the industry’s marketing model with little ambiguity: celebrity endorsements, virtual reality simulations, hyper-targeted campaigns, all directed at the small number of high-net-worth individuals for whom an exclusive, dangerous, narratable experience is precisely the product on offer. New Shepard flights were never sold as transport. They were sold as transformation, with the trip itself functioning as the delivery mechanism.
The pricing structure makes this legible. The first seat on New Shepard, auctioned in June 2021, sold for $28 million. The first publicly disclosed flight price, paid by the cryptocurrency organisation MoonDAO for the NS-22 flight in August 2022, was $1.25 million per ticket. Industry estimates, drawing on the publicly advertised range for Virgin Galactic, place typical seat costs between $200,000 and $450,000, and Blue Origin’s own reservation page requires a $150,000 refundable deposit before any seat negotiation can begin. By the day of the very first crewed flight, in July 2021, Bezos told a post-launch briefing in West Texas that the company was already approaching $100 million in private sales — most of it for seats that had not yet flown.
These are not transport fares. They are entry tickets to a luxury good, sold to two kinds of customer: those who pay directly, and those who are given a seat because their presence on the flight is a marketing asset worth more to Blue Origin than the cash price would be. The auction winner pays Blue Origin in money. The celebrity pays in attention. Both are forms of payment, and the company has been candid about this from the start. Its own press release announcing the December 2021 NS-19 crew distinguished, in a single sentence, between its “honorary guests” and its “paying customers”. The pattern continued through NS-31 itself: a Blue Origin spokesperson confirmed to CNN on the day of the launch that some passengers on the all-female crew were flying free of charge and others were not, while declining to identify which.
This is the part that makes the year-long focus on NS-31 strange. Of the eleven crewed New Shepard flights between July 2021 and April 2025, almost every one carried at least one such honorary guest, whose seat was, by Blue Origin’s own description, a marketing transaction. Bezos brought his brother on the first flight. William Shatner’s NS-18 seat in October 2021 was a media event; the actor’s eventual book-length account of the experience was, in its own way, precisely the return on investment Blue Origin had been hoping for. Michael Strahan flew on NS-19 in December 2021 as a Good Morning America anchor. The August 2024 NS-26 flight carried 21-year-old Karsen Kitchen specifically so that Blue Origin could announce the youngest woman ever to fly to space. None of these flights generated anything close to the year-long cultural argument that followed NS-31. The selection effect in coverage is itself a piece of evidence: the same critics who had little to say about the men who flew under structurally identical terms became loudly indignant when the marketing seats were filled by women, and visibly so. What changed was not what the company was selling. It was the visibility of the marketing.
This is where the critics’ anger was correctly aimed and wrongly directed. The women on NS-31 are not the embarrassment of the space economy. They are the most legible part of it. Perry’s pre-flight remark, much-quoted, that the crew were going to put the “ass” in astronaut was treated as proof of the mission’s frivolity; what it actually was, was an unusually candid admission of the product on offer. The crew was selling the experience of having gone. The company was selling the spectacle of the crew having gone. Both were honest about what was happening. The earlier flights had simply been better at dressing the same transaction in the language of exploration.
Blue Origin’s January 30 announcement has clarified the rest. The press release said the company would shift resources to accelerate its human lunar capabilities; the obvious referents, as Ars Technica‘s Eric Berger noted in his coverage of the pause, are Blue Moon — the lunar lander Blue Origin is building for NASA’s Artemis programme — and New Glenn, the heavy-lift rocket that will launch it. By the time New Shepard returns to service, if it does, the suborbital tourism programme will have served its purpose. It carried 98 people across 38 missions, by the company’s own figures. It built the operational expertise in human-rated spaceflight that the lunar work requires. It kept the brand visible while the harder engineering matured. And it provided a steady supply of well-known faces whose flights doubled as marketing for the next phase of the business. The real customer was always going to be the U.S. government. The tourists were the scaffolding.
There are caveats worth keeping in view. The women who flew on NS-31 are not interchangeable, and not all of them were paid in attention. Aisha Bowe’s path from community college to former NASA engineer to flight crew is genuinely the kind of biography the company likes to surface; the marketing does not make the biography less real. Amanda Nguyễn, a sexual assault survivor turned civil rights activist who had previously trained as a NASA astronaut candidate, has spoken about the mission in terms that resist the easy reading. The point is not that the flight was meaningless to the women on it. The point is that the cultural argument that erupted around it asked the wrong question. The right question was never whether these particular women should have been allowed to enjoy a Blue Origin flight. It was what kind of company sells flights of this kind, to this kind of customer, for this kind of reason, and what that company is actually building next.
The answer to that question, a year later, is now on Blue Origin’s own website.
