On the Starry, Spacy, Spectacle of the New Shepard Mission
April 15, 2025
Yesterday, an Amazon package was successfully delivered to the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space: The prime delivery, from Jeff Bazos’s Blue Origin space tourism program, saw his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, and an all-female crew—including singer Katy Perry and TV host Gayle King—rocketed to space for a three-mimute float (and a rousing rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” by Perry). Earthbound stars—Oprah Winfrey, Kris Jenner, and Khloé Kardashian—gathered to watch one small step for the planet’s first billionaire girls’ trip.
Lots of people want to hate on the voyage, and I get it. We have so many issues terra firma—war, genocide, famine, to name but a few—and the space-hop feels like a commentary on mankind’s inability to focus on our earthbound problems, to gaze instead at the stars. Monday’s flight cost the annual GDP of a small country, but as Winfrey sagely put it yesterday, “Life is about continuing into grow into the fullest expression of yourself.”
The mission represented the first time an all-female space crew has gone to space since 1963, a genuine feminist achievement—and yet it’s impossible to sidestep the deep commerciality of the stunt: the souvenirs readily available online, Sánchez’s well-publicized Skims under her spacesuit. In space, no one can hear you scream, but someone was recorded saying “I love you, Jeff Bezos” in the outer atmosphere.
And so, to Katy Perry. It’s been impossible to avoid the breaking news of a songstress in space, the final frontier for pop. And it’s hard to know how to feel about Perry’s interstellar jaunt, isn’t it? Like Perry herself, it’s kinda mega and kinda goofy, inarguably epic but sort of…silly? Holding up a daisy (her daughter’s name) to the heavens is silly, kissing the ground on re-entry is silly. And yet it’s all very sincere. Orlando Bloom and Daisy waiting back on the tarmac was heart-warming.
Commercial space travel is coming, and despite my cynical resting state, I can’t help being thrilled. It will be expensive and dangerous, encapsulating the human desire to venture beyond our own safety, as well as our own rationality (am I the only one seeing—God forbid—a direct line between Blue Origin and the Titanic sub? Space travel is the realized dream of Space Odyssey 2001, but whiffs of a zero-gravity Fyre Festival are also fast approaching. But despite the serious safety issues, despite the state of the planet, despite Katy Perry’s daftness, I’m afraid space is still cool. Rockets out of this world, you will always be famous.
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