Gayle King ‘Very Disappointed’ by Criticism of Blue Origin Spaceflight

Gayle King is hitting back at critics of the recent all-women Blue Origin spaceflight.

“I’ve certainly read some of the things online coming from people that I know, that I like, that I consider friends,” the CBS Mornings host, 70, told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published on Tuesday, April 15, just 24 hours after she and five other women entered space for around 11 minutes.

King, Katy Perry, filmmaker Kerianne Flynn, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos‘ fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, made history Monday, April 14, as they became the first all-women crew aboard a spaceflight since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 solo trip.

However, the trip has received criticism from the likes of Olivia Wilde and Emily Ratajkowski, who spoke out against the expensive journey amid a cost-of-living crisis in the U.S. and its impact on the environment.

Gayle King responds to the backlash surrounding Blue Origin’s all-female spaceflight: “I’m very disappointed… what it’s doing to inspire other women and young girls–please don’t ignore that.” pic.twitter.com/Je7V61dGR3

— Entertainment Tonight (@etnow) April 15, 2025

“This is what I would say to that: space is not an either/or, it’s a both/and. Because you do something in space doesn’t mean you’re taking anything away from Earth, and what you’re doing in space is trying to make things better here on Earth,” King told Entertainment Tonight. “What Blue Origin wants to do is take the waste here and figure out a way to put it in space to make our planet cleaner. Jeff Bezos has so many ideas, and the people that are working there are really devoted and dedicated to making our planet a better place.”

King went on to add, “Have you been? If you’ve been and you still feel that way after you come back, please let’s have a conversation.”

“So, I’m very disappointed and very saddened by it,” King said of the criticism, noting that she has received messages from women and girls who have been inspired by the all-women space crew.

King also called out people who called the trip a “ride,” noting that, “Whenever a man goes up, you have never said to an astronaut, ‘Boy, what a ride!’”

“We duplicated the same trajectory Alan Shepard did back in the day pretty much,” King explained. “No one called that a ride. It was called a flight, it was called a journey, because a ride implies that it’s something frivolous or something that’s light-hearted.”

“There was nothing frivolous about what we did, and the machine that we were on, and what it took for the people to get that machine up and running, to get us up and get us back down safely,” she continued.