A year ago, Lauren Sánchez, Katy Perry, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn had very little in common with each other. Now, however, they’ve shared an 11-minute trip to space together, and it hasn’t exactly been well-received. And for good reason.

Blue Origin, the private space company owned by Sánchez’s fiancé, billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced its 31st mission would be made up solely of women – the first since Russian astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo space flight in 1963. But this trip wasn’t about science or experimentation, it was purely for pleasure. On Monday, the women went up in the rocket, which flies itself, and spent four minutes experiencing weightlessness and looking out the windows at the Earth below before coming back down.

However, the thing about space tourism – seemingly the latest trend within the world of billionaires – is that it’s incredibly expensive and completely wasteful of the planet’s resources. And for what? So that a group of (mostly) rich women can say that they’ve been to space for a few minutes? It’s yet another example of the uber-rich and billionaires proving that they will hoard and waste wealth on these pointless endeavours, just because they can.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic are among the leading players in the space tourism race. Many of these billionaires don’t publicly advertise the cost of a seat on one of their rocket ships, but for Blue Origin, a £113,000 deposit is needed to secure a spot and previous auctions on Bezos’s space flights reached £21 million.

When there’s a cost of living crisis going on around the world, when 700 million people live in extreme poverty globally, and when there are wars and conflicts waging without end, these exclusive and expensive space holidays feel jarring and completely out of touch with people’s everyday experiences.

“The Blue Origin space mission was not a feminist win, but let’s criticise the wasted wealth and resources instead”