The New Shepard 31 will soon be host to an all-female crew, to carry them on their 11-minute space adventure. Designed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, it claims to be fully reusable, and specifically designed for human flight. There are no pilots, and the passengers sit in a small, round crew capsule at the top of the rocket.

The heart of the criticism lies in the nature of the mission. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, while undeniably advanced, follows a suborbital flight path. It climbs to about 62 miles (100 kilometres) above sea level—just beyond the Kármán line,