It’s OK To Feel Complicated About Amanda Nguyen & The Blue Origin Flight
Nguyen deserves her dreams, but it feels icky that it happened like this.
Trigger Warning: This piece contains references to sexual violence.
Blue Origin’s “historic all-female flight” took its 11-minute voyage on April 14 and... well. People had feelings. About space tourism, about Jeff Bezos, about Katy Perry singing to her fellow “crew members” as they descended back to Earth — it was all a big hot mess. It’s easy to say that this was a huge waste of money and a total epic fail, but in the middle of all of it are some actual women in STEM, like Amanda Nguyen. Seeing her achieve her dream of visiting space is lovely! Knowing she did it on a Bezos rocket is less so. And it’s OK to feel complicated about it.
Because honestly, if anyone deserves to go to space, it’s Amanda Nguyen. The bioastronautics research scientist is known for some pretty significant achievements, like being recognized as Time Woman of the Year in 2022. She’s the founder and CEO of Rise, a civil rights organization. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
She also drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, a bill that passed unanimously in 2016 and completely overhauled the way sexual assaults were reported, lessening the burden on victims.
The bill came after Nguyen was raped in 2013 while she was a student at Harvard University. She had already completed an internship at NASA in 2011 and 2013 and dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but after her assault, Nguyen took a 10-year break from her space dreams to pursue the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act and create and grow Rise.
So yeah, seeing her come out of the shuttle with her arms stretched to the sky? It felt like a full-circle bad*ss moment. Nguyen wrote on Instagram that she decided to bring her hospital bracelet from the night she reported her rape as her zero-g indicator on board the shuttle — the item she’d have in her pocket to let her know when microgravity conditions begin. She shared that it was like letting her pain see the world she had been dreaming of, letting her pain see the world she had changed.
It’s deeply moving. And knowing that Nguyen has built a legacy off of her trauma and pain, turning what happened to her into this incredible web of support and resources and change for other survivors, is huge. Of course she deserves to go to space. Of course she gets to have her dreams realized.
But... *sigh.* It’s hard not to feel complicated about it, knowing that the Blue Origin flight also had celebrities on it who paid a whole lot of money to Bezos for a PR stunt. Knowing the climate impact that 11-minute flight had on our world. Knowing that Bezos has been a pretty dominant supporter of Trump, and Trump’s administration is dismantling science left and right (in fact, female scientists are actively losing their jobs and being scrubbed from government websites).
Yet, there’s something there. Nguyen did manage to do some experiments while she was on board Blue Origin, including work that would affect women’s health in space, like space-friendly pads and tampons. She is the first Vietnamese woman to fly to space. Her family, coming to this country as refugees and looking for peace and growth and dreams, watched her launch off in a rocket.
There is a lot to be proud of for Nguyen. She’s a survivor, building a better world for all of us because of something horrible that happened to her. She deserves all the good things. She deserves to see Earth as a tiny speck. She deserves her dreams to come true.
I think we all just wish it wasn’t on a Bezos shuttle.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org.
