Blue Origin has been running a space tourism program for several years now. While it's not, precisely, necessary, Jeff Bezos saw an opportunity to sort of crowd fund his test launches, bring attention to himself, and offer some celebrities a chance to have a few minutes of weightlessness.
In almost every sense, it's the same as SpaceX offering space tourism to people as a lark (and one of these tourists is now the head of nasa, go figure!)
For the most part, these "missions" have attracted some attention, but mostly flown under the radar. Sure, there are people who call it wasteful and stupid, but generally no one cared.
And then Bezos decided to make history and create an all female crew.
And that's when the outrage started. It came from everywhere. Everyone had a take. Every angle was covered.
And I just have to ask… why?
Previous missions had similarly unqualified people who said similar things upon returning.
Why did this one garner so much negative attention?
And by the way, one of these astronauts was
Amanda Nguyen, who was in the nasa space flight program, and was going to be an astronaut at some point. But she gave up the dream to instead focus on her story and be an advocate for rape victims and work on civil rights. A short synopsis can be found here:
But that doesn't even register among all the noise we're hearing.
IMHO that should be the lead. It shouldn't be about how dumb this flight was - they are all dumb. Some attention should go to her finally fulfilling on her dream.
Man are we just idiots.
