Column: Bezos lost in PR space as Blue Origin’s all-female launch backfires

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Aaron Cohen, a longtime PR and brand executive. Cohen originally wrote about this topic on LinkedIn.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin may have made history on Monday for sending an all-woman crew into sub-orbit on its New Shepard rocket ship for all the wrong reasons.

From a pure PR perspective, this was a Jupiter-sized faceplant.

Bezos is positioning Blue Origin quite differently from another billionaire’s private company, SpaceX.  Elon Musk’s mission is to make humanity a multi-planetary species and arguably has at least a ten-year lead on Blue Origin.

On the other hand, Blue Origin is positioning itself as space tourism for the rich and famous.

It’s the worst time to do a space tourism PR launch for the super wealthy. The world economy is experiencing collective whiplash from POTUS’ tariffs. Consumer confidence is facing its second-lowest level ever recorded since 1952 — lower even than during the Great Recession and only surpassed by the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sending famous American pop stars like Katy Perry or his fiancée Lauren Sanchez is tone deaf and insensitive about our current economic roller coaster.

This has left Bezos — and the passengers on the flight — standing on the back of their heels, deer in headlights. It perfectly highlights the danger of being viewed as out of touch or disconnected with public opinion in the age of social media, and disconnected with reality. 

But it’s worse than that. It reeks of poorly performed virtue signaling. Showing extremely privileged women taking a magical vacation into space as passengers while leaving common folk grinding away at their hamster wheel does not a good deed make.  

It’s worse than even that, because it was a missed opportunity to honor women who should be on that flight, who have dreamed of it, and have dedicated their life to space flight. There are thousands of better ways to launch this mission successfully and still fill those seats up later with celebrities down the road.

It difficult to imagine any PR team approving this launch without waving flaming red flags. One would have thought the PR team would have pointed to another large tech company’s PR fiasco in 2024 of the iPad Pro when Apple showed a hydraulic press destroying the entirety of human creativity.     

As exciting as it is that we’re having a space renaissance thanks to Reagan’s Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, Bezos lost the script of inspiring kids, women, and everybody in between. It was a missed opportunity to honor the pioneers and underprivileged. Space flight sentiment is suddenly tanking along with the stock market.

One would think the inventor of Amazon knows a thing or two about the importance of having high EQ for product launches and connecting with the public.

It’s not the product. It’s the message. It is the story that builds the brand. Story is everything. 

Was Jeff Bezos’s mission accomplished? I think not.