Jessica Alba has thrown her support behind the controversial all-female Blue Origin mission, instead urging fans to direct their anger toward President Trump.
On Monday, Katy Perry, Gayle King and Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez joined astronaut and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and filmmaker Kerianne Flynn for a historic space flight.
But their 11-minute voyage prompted mass backlash, with a slew of celebrities, fans and even fast-food chains slamming the trip as pointless while others complained about its environmental impact.
On Wednesday, Alba took to her Instagram Story to share a message with her 21 million followers on the platform as backlash rages on.
The Honest Beauty founder, 43, reposted a message from political strategist Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, which encouraged people to direct their energy toward “denouncing” the POTUS.
“I’ve seen endless criticisms of 5 women doing their space thing, I can’t see how it affects our lives,” the message read, with Alba writing, “THIS,” above the post.
“I wish people would show same energy & focus that anger towards fearlessly denouncing Trump’s abuses of power, which do affect countless lives in the US and the world.”
The “Fantastic Four” alum, who boasts a close friendship with Sánchez, is one of the very few stars defending the trip.
Meanwhile, celebrities like Amy Schumer, Olivia Wilde, Emily Ratajkowski and Olivia Munn slammed the space voyage in a series of social media posts earlier this week.
The hate prompted King to speak out, as she suggested that the all-female crew was being held to a different standard than men who’ve been to space.
“Have you been?” King scolded critics.
“Please don’t call it a ‘ride,’” she added, claiming people don’t use this term when talking about men going into space.
“We duplicated the same trajectory that Alan Shepard did back in the day, pretty much. No one called that a ‘ride,’” the CBS host said. “It was called a flight, it was called a journey.”
“There was nothing frivolous about what we did,” she added. “I’m very disappointed and very saddened by it. And I also say this, what it’s doing to inspire other women and young girls, please don’t ignore that.”
She also addressed liberal critics who complained about the flight’s environmental impact, saying that Bezos’ mission with Blue Origin was to discover if the rocket would be able to take waste from Earth into space to “make our planet cleaner.”
“Space is not an either/or. It’s a both/and. And because you do something in space doesn’t mean you’re taking anything away from Earth,” King argued.
The star-studded team of women became the first all-female crew to visit space since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova took a solo flight in 1963.
