- On Monday, Katy Perry embarked on a space tourism mission with Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin.
- The 10-minute round trip scans as unnecessary and self-indulgent, especially in an unstable economy.
- It's the latest in a series of missteps for Perry, whose work has been criticized as out of touch.
Katy Perry's art has recently been criticized as out of touch, but on Monday, her commitment to alienating whatever support she has left took Perry all the way to outer space.
On Monday, Perry boarded one of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rockets to indulge in roughly 10 minutes of commercial space tourism. The six-person crew, which also included CBS News anchor Gayle King and Bezos' fiancée Lauren Sánchez, flew just above the Kármán line, the imaginary border of Earth's atmosphere, before returning safely to Texas.
It's the latest in a long line of public missteps for the singer, whose attempted pop comeback fell flat last year. It all started with her would-be hit single, "Woman's World," which took a swing at satire but missed the mark by a wide margin, leading to a full-blown "career crisis." What Perry's fans once celebrated as campy or quirky in the 2010s now rings hollow, like a tone-deaf echo of girlboss feminism and the bygone days of Obama-era optimism.
Perry fell into the same trap when she announced her plan to join the star-studded New Shepard crew, which has been hailed as the first all-female space trip since 1963 — but also blasted online as unnecessary, self-indulgent, and easily meme-able.
Blue Origin doesn't publicly disclose pricing for their private flights, but requesting to reserve a seat via the company's website requires a $150,000 deposit. Forbes reported that each passenger's ticket likely cost millions. The company's slogan is, "For the benefit of Earth," but it looks an awful lot like a bunch of rich people taking an ego trip.
Indeed, Perry embarked on a media circuit ahead of the mission — ostensibly attempting to explain its value but, in practice, demonstrating its lack thereof. Speaking with AP News, Perry recycled buzzwords like "feminine divine" that she often used to promote her latest album, "143," and waxed un-poetically about how the mission would fuel her own personal interests.
"I was winding down from a [tour] rehearsal the other day and I was listening to 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan and reading a book on string theory," she said. (Perry is also in the middle of her multi-continent Lifetimes Tour, in case you were craving a bit of cross-promotion.)
"I've always been interested in astrophysics and interested in astronomy and astrology and the stars," Perry continued. "It'll be exciting to see them twinkle from that sight."
It all begs the question: Exciting for whom? Despite her self-serving motivations, not even Perry seems poised to benefit from this publicity stunt. Perry's quotes about STEM and stars have drawn mockery on social media, while actor Olivia Munn openly criticized the Blue Origin mission as "gluttonous."
Many critics have noted the potential pollutants produced by rocket launches, especially frivolous ones — a reaction I'm frankly shocked Perry didn't foresee, given all the heat celebrities like Taylor Swift and the Kardashians have gotten for flying on private jets. Perry's celebrity brand, already in a fragile state since "143" flopped, is only growing more tarnished.
Of course, during her interviews about the space mission, Perry has thrown in some PR-approved fluff about inspiring the "next generation" of young girls to follow in her footsteps, but the subtextual requirements of Perry's own excursion — millions of dollars, Bezos-aligned social capital, a devastating lack of self-awareness — render the sentiment pretty much moot. Sure, maybe if those young girls happen to be the heirs of tech billionaires, they can shoot for the stars. The rest of us are preoccupied with everything going on down here.
As the most instantly recognizable name in the crew, Perry's involvement with Blue Origin has invited a lot of extra attention to its first all-female trip — and, by extension, to space tourism more broadly as a rapidly growing industry for the superrich. Most non-rich people probably don't even know the race to commercialize space is a thing that's happening. Meanwhile, Perry told Elle she has wanted to go to space for her entire adult life. "I was investigating all of the possible commercial options," she said.
Maybe Perry expects us to be happy for her, yet it's hard to think of a 10-minute joyride in a privately funded rocket as anything more than a vanity project — literally fulfilling a pop star's dream to "make space and science glam" and "put the 'ass' in astronaut," in Perry's own words — when the majority of Americans are worried about urgent earthly dreams like affording a carton of eggs, staying employed, and paying off student-loan debt.
If Perry was hoping her latest jaunt would add legitimacy to her self-styled stock of "feminine divine" energy — which is, importantly, not the same thing as feminism — she has missed the mark once again. I'm sorry to say that singing "What a Wonderful World" for a bunch of space tourists in a rocket does not advance gender equality, even if the tourists are all women.
If Perry was hoping her safe return to Earth would drive ticket sales for her coming concerts — which feels probable, given that she copied down the tour setlist to bring to space with her — then I hope she misses that mark, too. It's almost insulting to be the target of such an obvious marketing ploy.
But if Perry was hoping to remind us that her once-fun brand, full of relatable teenage dreams and harmless dancing sharks, has devolved into a tedious, performative, gleefully bourgeois shadow of its former self — well, then, mission accomplished.
