“CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King made a bold claim about her 10-minute jaunt into space on Monday and inspired a wave of social media mockery in the process.
King was one of six women launched into space via billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company. Although the all-female flight was criticized in part for the pseudo-feminism that accompanied it, King told Extra TV that two crew members on board “were actually doing experiments.”
King, who admitted she is a “nervous flyer,” said she still has a hard time calling herself an “astronaut” after the suborbital flight, but argued that the way people have minimized the voyage is “disrespectful.”
“You never see a man, a male astronaut who’s going up in space, and they say, ‘Oh, he took a ride,’” she pointed out.
King then suggested that she and the rest of the crew had something in common with the first American to travel into space.
“We actually duplicated the route that Alan Shepard did. … No one said, ‘He took that ride.’ It’s always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel that that’s a little disrespectful to what the mission was and the work that Blue Origin does.”
Still, King’s comparison to Shepard quickly inspired ridicule on social media.
Entertainment publicist Danny Deraney thought it would be fun to follow King’s lead and encouraged X users to post “something special you did that somebody famous did and makes you stand out.”
Deraney then described his own brush with greatness.
“So, I stood in the ocean in Normandy, France,” he wrote. “Just like our Allies. So now I am pretty much a member of Allied Forces.”
Other people joined in with their own claims of greatness.
But one person had an absurd achievement that topped everyone else’s:
I flew on a plane from LA to NY once with Gayle King in first class. I guess that makes me Oprah.
King’s full interview is below. Her remarks on Shepard start around the 10:07 mark.
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