She kissed the ground and she liked it

Why I simply CANNOT with this Blue Origin space flight

Calling Katy Perry an astronaut is like calling me a veterinarian because I kicked a ball around with my dog, or calling me a catwalk model because I got dressed this morning. I think both sick animals and fashion brands would both shudder if they saw me coming with a scalpel and/or the will to strut, respectively.

To contextualise: Yesterday, recording artist (I was gonna say musician but…) Katy Perry joined five other women (including Lauren Sánchez, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn) for an historic space flight.

This marked the first all-female crewed spaceflight since Valentina Tereshkova's solo mission in 1963. The 10-minute journey included three minutes of weightlessness and crossed the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space. During the flight, Perry sang What a Wonderful World and upon landing, she kissed the ground. Then she gave an interview to news channels about the overwhelming love she felt while in space. Frankly, someone in a K-hole or on their first shrooms trip would’ve given a more salient interview. You can see it here.

I just think the whole thing is a bit… gross.

First of all, there’s the money that would’ve been spent – some might say egregiously wasted – on the whole trip. Olivia Munn described it as ‘gluttonous’ and I’d be inclined to agree.

As if I need to remind anyone: We live in a time of unprecedented global crises. War, famine, climate catastrophe, mass displacement. Entire nations are sinking, burning, being torn apart. People are dying for water, food, medicine, electricity, shelter. And into this world, Jeff Bezos (a man whose fortune eclipses the GDP of most countries) chooses to fund joyrides to space, ones that last less time than it takes to hard boil an egg (which, as an aside, many people can’t afford to buy rn). This is how he spends his time and his wealth: creating high-gloss spectacles that say nothing, solve nothing, and help no one, except maybe a PR team that’s been hanging by a thread since the Amazon unionisation headlines started gaining traction.

Let’s put his wealth in perspective, because scale matters when you’re talking about obscenity: