Jessica Chastain Criticizes Blue Origin’s First All-Female Space Crew, Sharing Post Calling It The ‘Utter Defeat Of American Feminism’

Baila Eve ZismanApril 24, 2025, 4:21 pmNews >

Jessica Chastain has joined the growing group of public figures who have criticized the first all-female crew to go to space via Blue Origin.

The flight took off on April 14 and carried passengers Katy Perry, Gayle King, Amanda Nguyen, Lauren Sánchez, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe and film producer Kerianne Flynn.

The trip to space took roughly 11 minutes, with the spacecraft spending roughly two minutes in space. Upon returning to earth, Perry exited the craft and kissed the ground in a now-viral image.

Interviews with the group, in which jokes were made about putting the “ass” in “astronaut” and testing out new hairdos before the journey, have earned the group of women much scrutiny, as more and more people harp on the historic trip for being a waste of money and resources.

Billionaires spending small fortunes to go to space has long been a point of controversy, as many people condemn the excessive release of harmful toxins into the environment and the hedonistic use of exorbitant wealth for the benefit of “vanity vacations” to space.

Chastain shared an opinion piece from The Guardian on X, entitled, “The Blue Origin Flight Showcased the Utter Defeat of American Feminism.”

The piece, written by columnist Moira Donegan, called the trip “a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enables both scientific advancement and feminist progress – a spectacle that mocked these aspirations by appropriating them for such an indulgent and morally hollow purpose.”

Donegan also slammed Jeff Bezos, Sánchez’s husband and owner of Blue Origin, for his aerospace company, which served as a “testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok.”

While internet users have jumped to attack the crew, particularly Perry, for their lack of “achievement” on the journey, many people have overlooked the scientific work that Nguyen was conducting on board.

Nguyen herself has long awaited the trip to space. Originally pursuing a career in astrophysics at Harvard, Nguyen put her dreams of space on hold after she was raped and proceeded to dedicate herself to fighting for survivor’s rights. She created the non-profit government organization Rise and wrote a Sexual Assault Survivor’s Bill of Rights, which became federal law in 2016. In 2019, Nguyen was nominated for the Nobel Prize, and in 2022, she was named Time’s Woman of the Year. This flight was supposed to be widely recognized as a way to honor her aspirations and inspire other survivors to follow their dreams, but many news outlets remained focused on the celebrity passengers, and she was not included in the passenger list by many outlets.

While in space, Nguyen was also conducting research for the future of space travel. She tested a new fabric for spacesuits intended to absorb blood, as women have famously been excluded from trips to space due to concerns regarding menstrual blood. She also tested if a certain electrical chip was capable of detecting breast cancer in astronauts. However, her scientific contributions have been largely excluded from the coverage of the Blue Origin trip.

Other celebrities to criticize the trip to space include Emily Ratajowski, Olivia Munn and even the Wendy’s mascot via X.