Why Katy Perry’s space flight was one giant flop for mankind

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There is something very unsettling about knowing that Katy Perry has been to (the edge of) space. It wouldn’t have been good if any other pop star had boarded Jeff Bezos’ rocket in an elaborate marketing stunt for his space tech company – excuse me, ​“historic all-woman suborbital mission” – but at least if it was Lady Gaga or noted atomic bomb buff Cardi B or something it would have felt less incongruous. As it stands, the person responsible for ​‘Women’s World’ becoming the first artist ever to sing in space feels like a terrible omen for the future. Not that we were doing particularly well on that front in any case, but this certainly has not helped.

To recap: Perry was blasted into (the edge of) space alongside journalist Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher / civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez. The whole thing played out like a Love Island challenge set 100 years in the future. They each rang a massive bell before boarding the shuttle, like the influencer-realtors do on Selling Sunset when they close a deal, while being cheered on by a group of close acquaintances including Oprah, Kris Jenner, and Khloe Kardashian. Sánchez began organising their outfits five months in advance and called on Oscar De La Renta’s designers to whip up a cobalt blue kick-flare jumpsuit to ​“bring a little spice to space” (one early idea included adding a corset to cinch the waist, but sadly that would have made movement in zero gravity largely impossible). Bowe took her blow-dry for a test run, telling Elle: ​“I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good.” After the mission was complete, Cosmopolitan ran with the headline: ​“This £9.99 setting spray is what kept Katy Perry’s glam makeup intact when blasting through outer space.”

As well as becoming the first artist to sing in space (she sang Louis Armstrong’s ​‘What A Wonderful World’ – hell), Perry also became the first pop star to promote her concert in space when she held up a butterfly-shaped piece of paper to the cameras inside the shuttle with her new setlist written on it. When they returned to Earth after a grand total of 11 minutes, she kissed the ground like a liberated prisoner of war.

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The mission received hours of rolling news coverage and was almost universally despised. From left-wing pundits, to right-wing conspiracy YouTubers, to normal people who aren’t online eight hours a day, the general take-away was something to the effect of: ​‘it’s a bit fucking rich for a tech billionaire to send a team of women on a privately funded space trip and try to sell it as some sort of feminist ​“win” when wealth inequality is hitting pre-fall of Rome levels and poverty, which disproportionately affects women, is rampant. Do they think we’re fucking stupid?’ To which the answer is, of course, yes. 

It’s a shame for Bowe and Nguyen, who by all accounts had good cause to be involved in the first all-female space flight since 1963 and whose presence actually means something. Beyond that the whole thing basically chalks up to a very expensive advert for Bezos’ space tech company Blue Origin, which aims to turn the moon into a massive Amazon Warehouse (or, in its own words: ​“envision a future where millions of people will live and work in space with a single-minded purpose: to restore and sustain Earth”). On the upside Bezos fell over while rushing to greet his wife-to-be upon her return, which was very embarrassing for him.

While watching some of the crew reflect on the ​“phenomenal dream” experience and gushing about how Bezos is ​“building the road to space,” I was reminded of what William Shatner wrote about his own trip to space in his book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder. After playing a Starfleet captain on TV for decades, Shatner finally journeyed into the final frontier on a Blue Origin rocket in 2021, becoming, at age 90, the oldest person to travel to space at the time. He’d expected to feel ​“the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things.” When he got up there and looked down at the Earth, though, he found the opposite.

“I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound,” he writes. ​“It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

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No such insight from the girlboss rocket launch, unfortunately. I’m not saying this is a direct result of the hubris of the mission, butterfly effect style, but a week later Pope Francis, the most progressive leader the Catholic Church has ever had, died hours after meeting JD Vance. A power outage took out a massive chunk of continental Europe, plunging international company WhatsApp groups into disarray. And CNN announced that Gwyneth Paltrow has started eating carbs and cheese again. All clear apocalypse indicators. 

Meanwhile, Katy Perry is struggling to fill half the seats on her current tour – the one she made history promoting in (the edge of) space, yes – after releasing an album of bizarre Hillary Clinton-era feminist songs in 2024 that was the worst-reviewed of her career and among the most panned albums of the decade. It’s a genuinely shocking turn from someone who defined the pop landscape for so much of the late 2000s and early 2010s – her bottomless brunch bangers and cartoonish eccentricity now swapped for empty political messaging and the wide, dead eyes of someone who went to Burning Man and never spiritually returned. All things considered, maybe orbit wasn’t the worst place for her after all. At least in space, no one can hear you flop.

Emma Garland is a freelance writer and former digital editor of Huck. Follow her on Bluesky.

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