In case you are not on social media and haven’t witnessed the slew of TikToks and memes (the majority of which are admittedly quite funny), the internet is not best pleased with Katy Perry at the moment since she went to the very outer limits of space for 11 minutes on 14th April.
Perry was part of an all-female team composed of six women who went up on a Blue Origin rocket, a space tourism company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Others on board included Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, and former CBS presenter and Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, Gayle King. To reserve a seat, each woman had to pay a $150,000 (£114,575.85) deposit.
The tagline of this nip up to the great unknown was the women were ‘taking up space’, a moderately clever play on words we can all agree, but which is now pretty cringe-inducing given the response back down on earth.
Taking up space is exactly what these women are doing, and I struggle to find a positive angle with this story. They are trying to hide behind feminism and a message of female empowerment, but they are out of date. A rocket full of female astronauts or scientists who have dedicated their life to studying this area, would have been a much more inspirational and celebratory event, shining a spotlight on the work done by women in a field which is still male-dominated. Blue Origin could have sent up a team of women, who actually know what they are talking about, for a much longer time to do some much more worthwhile work. Of the six women on board, just one, Aisha Bowe, was a former NASA scientist.
The image of women in space thus becomes the Katy Perry show; a new, extreme type of PR for her flailing career, a vanity project
Instead, Katy Perry takes up space as she floats around, gazing at herself in the camera rather than the once-in-a-lifetime view of the earth she was sent up to see. She brought a daisy up to represent her daughter, Daisy, and also managed to release the set list for her latest world tour on a paper butterfly. The image of women in space thus becomes the Katy Perry Show, a new, extreme type of PR for her flailing career, a vanity project. It comes across that she clearly couldn’t care less about going to space and how unbelievably fortunate she is to have this opportunity, but rather shows her determination to remain relevant, go viral and a become a ubiquitous face and name. Her non-sensical answer of feeling ‘super connected to love’ when she came back down sums it all up perfectly, it is all about her and nothing whatsoever about the humility many before her have recounted when looking back down at earth and realising how tiny and inconsequential we all are.
As if living in this dystopian nightmare where billionaires and their buddies jet off to space for 11 minutes isn’t bad enough, we have yet to consider what is potentially more important than whether Katy Perry is in the internet’s favour or not: the immense environmental impact of this jaunt. While Blue Origin states its flights only emit water vapour, which is still a greenhouse gas, and not carbon dioxide; experts estimate that the flight on 14th March released 50 tonnes of carbon emissions. For context, the average person in the UK releases 12 tonnes of carbon emissions per year (which is still higher than the global average).
Hearing these figures when us normal folk down here are trying to do our bit can feel extremely discouraging. While people follow plant-based diets, try to avoid fast fashion, cycle or walk more instead of driving, etc etc, I can’t help thinking what on earth is the point of all that effort when it has been shown time and time again that the fate of our planet ultimately comes down to billionaires and industry-wide decisions on a mammoth-scale, and not whether I properly recycle my plastics.
2025 has been a whiplash inducing year in the news, with unbelievable story after unbelievable story, and here is yet another one. It highlights how out of touch those with huge economic influence are with what this world wants and needs. They can dress it up and disguise it with whatever language they want, calling it a ‘journey’ instead of a ‘ride’, and hailing it as a victory for women and for science. However, the reality is while these people have the means to deliver fundamental change in response to some of the world’s issues, and they seemingly have no issue spending their money; they have exhausted all that is available to them on planet earth and are now preoccupied with finding a second planet to damage.
Image: The Launch Pad
HEX 
Leave a comment