A female space tourist who was bombarded by sexist messages after images of her experience were published online has spoken out about the misogyny she faced.
Emily Calandrelli is an MIT engineer, and Emmy-nominated TV host and New York Times best-selling author, known as The Space Gal to her nearly 3 million followers. The first US female to be the sole host of a nationally broadcast science series, her activism has led to improvements around parental leave and for breastfeeding mothers in the aerospace industry.
“That’s our planet!”
She became the 100th woman to go to space by becoming a fully paid-up ticket holder on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin’s ninth human flight on 22 November 2024. The mission beyond the Karman line, the boundary of space, even had its own specially-designed patch featuring pink elements and a young girl, to represent Calandrelli’s mission to inspire little girls to consider science, engineering and tech careers.
The experience on board was beyond what Calandrelli had anticipated. “I didn’t expect to see so much space, and I kept saying that’s our planet! That’s our planet!” she said, adding, “It was the same feeling I got when my kids were born, and I was like, ‘That’s my baby!’”
Sexist reaction prompted re-edit
But when Blue Origin posted footage of the flight that included images of Calandrelli floating upside-down and weightless, as well as her verbal reactions to seeing Earth from space, the video was greeted by a wave of hateful and sexualised comments. The sexist reaction was so offensive, Blue Origin made the decision to take the clip down and re-edit it.
Calandrelli described being so upset by the comments that she cried on her journey home from the space flight. “This all happened as I was flying home after experiencing the most perfect, wonderful dream-achieving experience of my life,” the engineer wrote on Instagram. “And instead of being on cloud nine, I’m crying in my seat staring out the window.”
“Small men on the internet”
However, Calandrelli has refused to let the trolls “dull her shine” as one member of the return journey flight crew advised her. She has since reposted the video on her own social media channels, declaring that she will not “give much time to the small men on the internet.”
She went on, “I feel experiences in my soul. It’s a trait I got from my father,” she said. “We feel every emotion deeply and what a beautiful way that is to experience life. This joy is tattooed on my heart. I will not apologize or feel weird about my reaction. It’s wholly mine and I love it.”
Addressing the idea that men and women might have different attitudes to space and space flight, Calandrelli told CNN that sending more women into space means they “get to describe it in a way that moms can understand, that women can understand”.
