CBS morning host and Oprah Winfrey’s BFF Gayle King blasted critics of her “space mission” with several other millionaire lady celebs this week as a bunch of sexists, saying that no one would be mocking the all-female "crew" if they'd been men before comparing herself to 1960s astronaut Alan Shepard.
“You never see a man, a male astronaut who’s going up in space, and they say, ‘Oh, he took a ride,’” King said.
“We actually duplicated the route that Alan Shepard did…No one said, ‘He took that ride.’ It’s always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel that that’s a little disrespectful to what the mission was and the work that Blue Origin does,” she went on.
Gayle King wants to be treated like a real astronaut: "Nobody calls it a ride if male astronauts goes to space" pic.twitter.com/D9c3qn6fTI
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 16, 2025
Since it bears a mention, Shepard, an accomplished Naval aviator and a trained astronaut, was the first American to travel into space and later became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon. And while his first orbital flight only lasted about 15 minutes - about five minutes longer than Blue Origin’s publicity stunt - he actually piloted the spacecraft during his flight, and did it all without the help of designer bellbottoms and a bad lip job.
King, on the other hand, is a TV host who donned a skin-tight blue jumpsuit and got blasted just past the atmosphere by a commercial space travel company to float around for about 10 minutes, during which Katy Perry waved flowers and the gals squealed and passed around stuffed animals, before being directed on a controlled landing by a team remote-piloting the spacecraft from Earth.
But sure, King. You're just like the OG astronauts. You go girl.