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As stupid as I thought it would be, it was even stupider. It was one thing to understand intellectually that Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez’s much hyped “all-female” trip to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket would in actuality only be an underwhelming 11 minutes long. But it was another to watch it play out over a multihour, breathless livestream that culminated with Perry kissing the Earth like a soldier returning from war and not a multimillionaire returning from the world’s shortest influencer trip. If this flight is to have any world-historical significance, it will be for achieving previously uncharted levels of tastelessness. They took up space, all right—space in our psyches that we will never get back.

A day later, I still can’t really believe it. Who would have thought it was even possible for Perry in particular to seem even more out of touch than she was proven to be last year, when she released a new album that seemed woefully trapped in 2016? And yet Perry was all too happy to not only join this trip and triumphantly become the first pop star to promote her concert in space, which she did when she held up a butterfly-shaped piece of paper to the cameras inside the shuttle midflight with her new set list apparently written on it. We’ll just ignore that the writing was so small that no one could actually read it. At least, as King revealed afterward, Perry magnanimously chose to serenade her fellow astronauts on the trip not with one of her own songs but with “What a Wonderful World,” though even that would have had me reaching for the emergency exit hatch.

As tacky as Perry is, as the driving forces behind this mission, Sánchez and her fiancé, Jeff Bezos, who owns Blue Origin, are surely worse. When Sánchez landed, she was first out. Bezos gave her a big hug and reminded her that now she was free to go see her “babies,” which I assume meant her kids. “Where are my babies?” she exclaimed. “They’re over here, go see ’em,” Bezos encouraged her. She clearly has that man eating out of the palm of her hand. Later, Sánchez reflected on her time looking down at the Earth: “You look at this, and you’re like, ‘We’re all in this together.’ ” Are we, though?

As befitting any rich-people event, Oprah was on hand to watch her best friend King participate in the flight; she teared up as it happened. Several Kardashians were there too, as was Orlando Bloom and the young daughter he shares with Perry, Daisy—Perry brought a daisy on board the flight in her honor. Sánchez, for her part, brought a stuffed animal inspired by a character in her children’s book, a fly named Flynn.

Watching the livestream before takeoff, a few space movies flitted though my mind. Did Perry crib that kissing-the-Earth move from Gravity? Poor King managed to carry herself with almost the exact same seriousness as the oil riggers–turned–astronauts in Armageddon before they leave on an extremely dangerous operation to destroy an asteroid. She was the only one who looked scared ringing a bell on her way to the shuttle before the flight. Everyone else looked exuberant doing it, and they reminded me above all of an entertainment property that has ostensibly nothing to do with space: Netflix’s Selling Sunset, a reality show about real estate where the agents celebrate their sales by ringing an oversize bell in the offices of Los Angeles’ Oppenheim Group. They too just so happen to be a boldly dressed all-female team backed by an extremely rich bald man. Appealing women turn out to be an asset whether you’re selling houses or recreational trips to space. I also think it’s an apt comparison in that I believe there’s a good chance the cast of Selling Sunset will have roughly the same level of impact on future women in STEM as the women on this Blue Origin trip, which is to say, very little.

Don’t just take it from me. The flight is receiving widespread criticism online, even from people who have previously counted themselves fans of Sánchez’s. Hawking space travel for rich people at a time like this, and what’s more, trying to sell it as feminist, has not gone over well. Who knows if that will have any impact on Bezos’ ability to sell tickets to space (which reportedly go for upward of a million bucks apiece), but it’s nice to know the greater public sees this as more of a crash and burn than anything else. What a wonderful world.

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