Christine Baranski has never been one to mince words, and her latest target is one of the flashiest displays of wealth in recent memory — Blue Origin’s celebrity-packed space trip.
Speaking at an August 11 panel for HBO’s The Gilded Age, Baranski drew a sharp line between the show’s depiction of wealth inequality and what she sees as its real-world equivalent: sending famous women into suborbital space for what she considers no real purpose.
“The grotesque displays of wealth sending women into a spaceship for what?” she said, according to The Daily Mail. “So they can do their makeup?”
The actress, 73, was referring to April’s Blue Origin launch that included Lauren Sánchez, Katy Perry, Gayle King, producer Kerianne Flynn, and rocket scientist Aisha Bowe. “Don’t get me started,” Baranski added.
She’s not the only one who has publicly questioned the mission’s value. Olivia Munn voiced similar frustrations earlier this year, telling Today With Jenna & Friends that she couldn’t reconcile the cost of such a trip with the state of the world.
“It’s so much money to go to space, and there’s a lot of people who can’t even afford eggs,” Munn said. “What are you guys gonna do up in space? Is it historic that you’re going on a ride? I think it’s a bit gluttonous.”
Munn, echoing arguments that date back to the earliest days of private space tourism, contrasted the mission with traditional exploration’s stated purpose — to advance science and benefit humanity. Without research objectives or tangible outcomes, she said, the trip felt more like a spectacle than a step forward.
Katy Perry, meanwhile, brushed off the critiques. Onstage in April, she asked the crowd, “Has anyone ever called your dreams crazy?” making it clear she saw the flight as personal ambition fulfilled, not an indulgence.
Founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin frames its work as part of a larger mission: to make space travel more accessible, to use space’s resources to benefit Earth, and to ultimately create livable habitats in low Earth orbit. Its technology emphasizes reusable rockets and engines to lower costs and promote sustainability.
But for Baranski and others, the problem is less about the engineering and more about the optics — who gets to go, and why. In her view, the trip says less about humanity’s future among the stars than it does about inequality here on Earth. And in the middle of a panel on wealth disparities, that made for a pointed — and, for some, uncomfortable — parallel.
