Why the “feminist” Blue Origin space flight was an affront to women like Sally Ride

Plus: Picks for movies and TV shows about REAL women in space (or those who belonged there)

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, comedian Marcia Belsky went viral with a song called “100 Tampons,” about Sally Ride’s history-making trip to space.

“Remember when NASA sent a woman to space for only six days and they gave her 100 tampons; 100 tampons?” She sang—repeating the ludicrous quantity for comedic emphasis while tapping out a melody on her keyboard. “And they asked, ‘Will that be enough?’ Cause they didn’t know if that was enough. These are our nation’s greatest minds. They are literally rocket scientists.”

The anecdote, recounted in Lynn Sherr’s biography Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space, captured a feeling, familiar to many women: Men—even NASA engineers who dedicate their lives to exploring the frontiers of the known universe—struggle to comprehend bodily functions experienced by half the people on this planet. For Ride, being first meant being perceived as an alien by her peers.

I have been thinking about “100 Tampons” a lot this week in the wake of Blue Origin’s much-hyped all-female mission to space, a supposed victory for women that was—in fact—an expensive, empty exercise in girlboss feminism that accomplished little more than uniting us all in our shared disdain for Katy Perry. The pop star was one of several celebrities on board the New Shepard rocket, but don’t worry, she totally prepared by listening to an audio version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

She was joined by Lauren Sanchez, whose qualifications include (exclusively?) being engaged to Jeff Bezos, and Gayle King, a respected journalist whose presence was in some ways the most disappointing. (And the most ethically fraught: why was it OK for the CBS Mornings host to take a trip to space courtesy of Jeff Bezos when most journalists can’t even accept a flight on Spirit Air?) There were two actual scientists on board, Amanda Nguyen and Aisha Bowe, but their legit contributions have largely been overshadowed by the presence of the more famous passengers.

As Jessica Grose noted in the New York Times last week, the supposedly feminist mission was especially galling given that the Trump administration, which Bezos supports generously, has fired dozens of NASA employees, including chief scientist Katherine Calvin, while forcing the agency to cut DEI programs, imperiling the future Sally Rides and Mae Jemisons of the world. I don’t know if anyone brought tampons aboard the New Shephard, given that the trip lasted for a soaring 11 minutes. But in a cover story for Elle, Sanchez gushed about her plan to get glam before the flight, sounding more like a Real Housewife on a cast trip to Cabo than a supposed advocate for women in STEM. At a time of intense economic uncertainty, the Blue Origin flight has also sparked a massive eat-the-rich backlash reminiscent of the Titan submersible in 2023.

I would say it’s all beyond parody, except that it’s not: In a 2023 episode of the delightfully unhinged Apple TV+ drama The Morning Show, Reese Witherspoon’s character, a TV news personality, crosses the Kármán Line aboard a billionaire’s spaceship. When the episode aired in September 2023, many critics thought the whole storyline was fantastically implausible. And yet here we are, barely a year and a half later, and it’s our reality. (Except even the writers of The Morning Show wouldn’t have dared to have Reese sing “What a Wonderful World” during her short trip to space.)

The Blue Origin mission is especially galling when you consider the sacrifices made by women like Sally Ride—and the diversity initiatives that made her historic mission to space possible, which are chronicled in Sally, a Nat Geo documentary which screened at Sundance and will air this summer. Ride was a graduate student at Stanford when she spotted an article in the Stanford Daily about NASA’s push to recruit women. She applied, and was one of six women in NASA’s Astronaut Group 8—the first to include any women or people of color—in 1978. Five years and many dumb questions about tampons later, she became the first American woman to go to space. Presumably, she left the eyelash extensions behind.

After Ride died in 2011, it was revealed she had been in a committed relationship with a woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy, for 27 years—a fact she kept private in part because of the sexism and homophobia she faced in the space program. As a child of the ‘80s, I vividly recall watching the Challenger space shuttle explode on live TV. School children across the country had tuned in to watch Christa McAuliffe become the first teacher in space, only to witness the catastrophe. The mission also included four of Ride’s classmates from Astronaut Group 8: Dick Scobee, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, and Judith Resnik (who decorated the NASA women's locker room with Tom Selleck posters and sounds like an incredible personality).

Ride retired from NASA in 1987, but spent the rest of her life promoting science education. Your move, Katy Perry.

While we wait for the release of Sally, here are a few other projects that look at women in space:

Hidden Figures — This Oscar-nominated 2016 film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book of the same name, tells the overlooked true story of three Black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA during the space race and helped make John Glenn’s 1962 space flight possible.

For All Mankind — Co-created by Ronald D. Moore, the sci-fi auteur behind cult favorite Battlestar Galactica, this Apple TV+ speculative drama presents an alternate version of the space race in which the U.S.S.R. beat the United States to the moon, and responds by aggressively diversifying the NASA ranks with women and people of color. Imagine that!

Mercury 13 — You have probably heard of the Mercury Seven, the American astronauts whose historic mission was memorialized in the book and film adaptation of The Right Stuff. You have probably heard much less about the group eventually dubbed the Mercury 13, a privately funded group of female pilots who passed the same tests given to the Mercury Seven but were denied admission into the space program. This Netflix documentary tells their (maddening) story. I wish I could say this one, based on decisions made more than half a century ago, is a period piece from a different era, the program’s baseless rejection of highly qualified women gives it a distinct resonance to 2025.