Are suborbital tourism flights getting old?

This week Blue Origin launched its NS-31 mission carrying a crew of six above the Karman Line for a short 11-minute flight. The flight was historic for being the first all-female spaceflight since 1963 and was marketed as a feminist movement, but some have doubts it did anything. So, are PR stunt suborbital spaceflights getting old? Or is it just Blue Origin’s take on them?

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifted off from its West Texas launch site at 8:30 AM CT with the NS-31 crew. The six crew members consisted of Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, Gayle King, Amanda Nguyễn, Katy Perry, and Lauren Sánchez. Notably, King is a host of CBS Mornings, Perry is a pop star, and Sánchez is the fiancée of Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos.

The launch took them to an altitude of 346,802 feet, above the Karman Line, and officially in space. The only other time a spaceflight consisted of a fully female crew was the launch of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963.

NS-31’s total flight time was ten minutes and 21 seconds. The flight was Blue Origin’s 11th human spaceflight.

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Reactions back on Earth

With threats of stagflation due to President Trump’s tariffs, many have seen the flight as a symbol of the great wealth divide in the United States. However, the flight has been in the works for over a year.

The NS-31 flight and interview completed by the crew prior to launch led to a New York Times opinion piece that poked at the crew’s obsession with their eyelash extensions they would be wearing. Actress Olivia Munn chimed in during her appearance on Today With Jenna and Friends, “If you wanna go to space, why do you need to tell us about it, you know? It’s just like, go up there, have a good time, come on down.” Munn continued, “I know this is probably obnoxious, but like, it’s so much money to go to space, and there are a lot of people who can’t even afford eggs.”

The flight even got mentioned in one of my personal favorite news podcasts, Pivot, with co-host Kara Swisher stating, “They’re going up there. It’s a total PR stunt. You are not here to save women. I’m sorry. If you wanted to save women, you’d be saving the woman who was grabbed off the street. You’d be saving all kinds of things. Or you’d be pushing up against Facebook and saying, really, they shouldn’t be doing things to young girls that make them feel bad. Like this is not, of all the things you could do to help women, this is not one of them. And that’s how I feel about it. But have fun.”

Not to mention the memes that hit the internet of the crew kissing the ground when exiting the New Shepard capsule.

Space Explored’s Take

Would the public reaction to Blue Origin’s mission been as strong without its three celebrity crew members and alongside Oprah and the Kardashians featured in the launch stream? Probably not.

The mission shouldn’t be taken to have no merit; the three other crew members that are rarely mentioned in most coverage of the launch—Bowe, Flynn, and Nguyễn—are all talented engineers, scientists, and filmmakers, and their trip to space should be praised. Even Sánchez completed a research mission while in flight for Teachers in Space.

However, it might not be the crew’s fault at all, but Blue Origin’s method for promoting these missions. From the start, Blue Origin has blown their crewed flights out of proportion, and that isn’t to say Virgin Galactic didn’t do the same when they began. However, Blue Origin portrays each mission as a historic moment, often having at least one notable member on the flight to snag headlines. Their streams are marketing tools, designed to convince potential customers to purchase tickets for future flights.

Compare this to Virgin Galactic, which too overplayed its crew’s historic importance in its early flights; however, it pivoted in later flights to not even disclosing the names of non-government crew members prior to the flight’s stream. Virgin Galactic understood its flights would become routine when they were just filled with tourists and focused more on flights that featured actual researchers conducting various experiments on their flights.

Blue Origin’s crewed flights take a reportedly 14 hours of training to be certified to fly. That’s for a total length of 11 minutes. Fun? Of course. Historic and noteworthy? Not since its first crewed flight with Jeff Bezos.