CLEAVAGE IN THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM.

Didn't the first iteration of Star Trek crew Enterprise with some skimpily-clad yeomen?

Elle cover retrieved from Sasha Stone.

The ladies went up to the tropopause and returned safely to Earth.  That didn't impress Guardian columnist Moira Donegan, who carped, "The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism."

There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-female flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.

The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress – a spectacle that mocked these aspirations by appropriating them for such an indulgent and morally hollow purpose.

Blue Origin itself is a product of state abandonment of space exploration. Founded in 2000 to fill the void left by the federal government’s effort to privatize the work of agencies like Nasa, Blue Origin has long been a pet project of Bezos, who was almost the sole funder of the company in its early years. Focused on tourism, rather than scientific inquiry, the company is best known for its slow technological development in comparison with its main competitor, SpaceX (another company involved in space tourism, launched by the Trump adviser and mega-donor Elon Musk); for the giggle-inducing obscene look of its rockets; and for its periodic publicity stunt flights featuring celebrities (William Shatner has also taken the ride).

And yes, the Militant Normals might have had "Skyrockets in Flight" as an ear-worm that day.

Perhaps Blue Horizon is about selling the experience, or is it the titillation?

Blue Origin is a private firm, and the Bezos team is certainly welcome to celebrate achieving its goal. Rather than attempting to emulate Musk in sending mankind to Mars, Blue Origin appears to be trying to capture the space tourism market. Hence, all the pop stars and glitterati.

That's too much for Mx Donegan.

Once, Nasa was the pride of the American experiment: a testament to how a society dedicated to legal equality and passionate hard work could expand the horizons of human possibility. Now, Blue Origin is a testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok. Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic. The Blue Origin flight does not make me feel like humanity will reach new heights of achievement. It makes me feel like everything that is coming is grimly predictable, tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth.

But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man. (The fact that the rocket itself looks so phallic does not help to lessen the flight’s message that the surest way for women to raise themselves in the world is to attach themselves to a man.)

There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur whose past work with Nasa makes her something closer to an actual astronaut. But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness.

In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women, and particularly women of color, in Stem.

Well, she sure sounds like a lot of fun to hang out with.  The North Atlantic also used to be a frontier for human exploration: dragon ships laden with berserkers; Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria with explorers and treasure hunters; Mayflower with entrepreneurs and prophets; Britannic or Mauretania with immigrants and capitalists; and Mx Donegan would undoubtedly see Formal Night on Regal Princess as the quintessence of superficiality: what could be more unserious than a cruise, particularly one that loops out of Port Everglades or New Orleans or Los Angeles?  For my part, I was expecting Pan American shuttles to orbiting Hiltons a quarter century ago.  Progress is all about the dramatic becoming the mundane, whether it's transoceanic travel or nutritious food or space exploration.

We're not yet to the Mayflower level of space exploration, and yet, because it seems frivolous, the Cultural Progressives are Most Troubled.  Take Ellen Cushing for The Atlantic.  (Please?)  "The Perfect Pop Star for a Dumb Stunt."  That would be Katy "I Kissed a Girl" Perry.

Space tourism is, at best, folly—silly, spectacularly wasteful, pointless by definition. (At worst, it’s a remarkable way to get blown up.) But then again, so is celebrity. And Perry is a special kind of celebrity—the sort who doesn’t seem to mind looking kind of stupid.

The opportunities to posture, though, slip the surly bonds of Earth.  I remember Alan Shepard.  And news reader Gayle King is no Alan Shepard.

“We duplicated the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s flight back in the day,” said King. Indeed, King participated in what Bezos has called his New Shepard rocket program.

“No one called that a ‘ride,'” King said, referring to Shepard’s pioneering voyage. “A ride sounds frivolous. It sounds insignificant.”

“This was a bona fide flight,” King emphasized about what she believes that she, Sanchez, Perry and the other women accomplished on Monday.  “I don’t like people trying to minimalizing [c.q] what was done here.”

To many, King’s protest rang hollow in light of the world witnessing that her ride was nothing like Shepard’s flight.

Well, no, Freedom 7 took off from Florida and splashed down in the Atlantic, while Cleavage 6 took off from the steppes of Texas to bump down on the virgin lands of Texas.  There is method to my terminology, dear reader.

Alan Shepard's daughter, on the other hand, has ridden from the Bezos Cosmodrome.

Shepard continued his career with NASA for another 13 years and went on to walk on the Moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, famously hitting a golf ball during a moonwalk.

Shepard’s daughter, Laura Shepard Churchley, offered a much more apt way than King of discussing any parallels between Blue Origin space-tourism rides and her father’s flight, according to CBS News. As a guest of Bezos’s, she participated in a Blue Origin trip in 2021, but she, unlike King, called her adventure what it was — a “ride.”

Churchley rode up in the capsule with Michael Strahan, another TV personality. She noted that her father had to stay strapped to his seat, while she and her fellow passengers were able to leave their seats, float around and look out the window.

“He didn’t get to enjoy any of what I was (enjoying),” she told Bezos. “He was working.”

Bezos agreed: “It was all business.”

“Right, he had to do it himself. I went along for the ride,” Churchley said.

Do Blue Origin passengers even have to wear space helmets?  Apparently not, notes Sasha "Thinking Through the Fourth Turning" Stone, although designer jumpsuits are part of the show.

Today, six women decided to “take up space” by training for a couple of days, doing lots of publicity, squeezing into fancy spacesuits, and then taking a Blue Origin rocket into space for a few minutes before returning to Earth.

In the dreamscape of Woketopia, they made history as the first all-female flight crew ever to reach outer space. In actual reality, if you’re lucky, you are engaged to a guy with enough money and his own rocket to gift you with that experience.

To actually make history, you’d need real astronauts who worked all of their lives for that moment.

The crew neither reached outer space as we currently understand it, nor were they the first all-female flight crew.  I mean, dear reader, if even Elle writers get it right?

Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sánchez, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn departed Earth on a Blue Origin rocket, traversing the cosmos for about eight minutes before returning safely to the ground. The flight marks a historic moment: The group is the first all-female crew to head to space in over 60 years; the only other female-led mission was a solo journey in 1963.

A solo journey in 1963?  No, there's not a recently released document in the Kennedy murders files in which Gordon Cooper identifies as female.  Rather, "woke" is an Americanization of социально прогрессивные взгляды, comrades!

In 1961, a Soviet space official learned that female pilots were being trained as cosmonauts in America. Asserting that the first woman in space must not be an American, as it would be “an insult to the patriotic feelings of all Soviet women,” it was determined that the next group of cosmonauts trained in the Soviet Union must include women. The initial group of 400 women would ultimately be narrowed down to just five; given her impressive parachutist background, [Valentina Vladimirovna] Tereshkova made the cut.

Following more than a year of training, Tereshkova was selected above her four female peers to be the first woman to travel to space. The launch of her aircraft took place on June 16, 1963. She orbited Earth 48 times over the course of nearly 3 days, and landed in Kazakhstan on June 19. Documents which remained classified until the collapse of the Soviet Union indicate that a systems error nearly prevented the ship from navigating back to Earth, but that quick action on the part of Tereshkova and engineers on the ground allowed for a recalibrated landing at the last moment.

Tereshkova was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Gold Star Medal, and the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, as well as many international awards and recognitions. She would never return to space but to this day remains active in promoting space education and culture. Politically active both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she currently serves as a member of the Russian State Duma representing the United Russia party.

As Legal Insurrection contributor Leslie Eastman notes, "[R]eal astronauts working in space return wearing substantially less make-up."  They also rate an appearance with somebody who outranks an oligarch.

RIA Novosti photograph retrieved from The Moscow Times.

Where is the fashion show announcer saying "Very nice?"  And why is Valentina Vladimirovna in civilian clothes?  The next women into space flew two decades later, Cosmonaut Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya and Space Shuttle Astronaut Sally Ride.