Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos‘ aerospace company Blue Origin doesn’t seem all that close to its stated objective of a world in which millions of people live and work in space. But when it comes to briefly launching celebrities out of Earth’s atmosphere, they’ve got the playbook down.
On Monday morning, six women completed the first all-female spaceflight since 1963, when the Soviet Union sent one woman cosmonaut up by herself. The crew included former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, film producer and documentarian Kerianne Flynn, sexual assault survivor advocate and Nobel nominee Amanda Nguyễn, broadcaster Gayle King, journalist (and Bezos’ fiancée) Lauren Sánchez — and singer Katy Perry, seemingly chosen for her music’s themes of female empowerment and nods to rockets and aliens in the songs “Firework” and “E.T.”
As with previous Blue Origin passenger William Shatner, who gifted the company some positive PR with his Star Trek fame as he became the oldest person to visit space in 2021 at the age of 90, Perry’s name led most media coverage of the West Texas launch, the eleventh crewed flight for the New Shepard rocket. But it is perhaps in the nature of stan armies to take a harsh line on the supposed achievements of a pop diva, and in this digital ecosystem, Perry’s brief moment of space tourism — a thrill for which some less-famous people have paid up to $30 million — drew its share of brutal reviews.
First and foremost, viewers were surprised to learn that the entire trip lasted just 11 minutes from blast-off to touchdown, with the booster rocket carrying a passenger capsule to suborbital space, where the crew would experience three to four minutes of weightlessness before the capsule arcs back down to land on our planet via parachute. One X user joked about the discrepancy between headlines that declared “Katy Perry going to space!!” and a diagram of the “actual trip,” comparing it to a scene of SpongeBob SquarePants and his Starfish friend Patrick riding a kiddie roller coaster that consists of one tiny bump. The author of an account devoted to coverage of pop star Ariana Grande wondered, “Why did i think katy perry would stay in space for a few days/weeks,” expressing a common confusion over the parameters of a Blue Origin flight. Another commentator pointed out that the short film for Taylor Swift‘s “All Too Well” was longer than the space mission, wrote that they’ve “had trips to the grocery store more eventful than whatever [the fuck] that was,” and concluded, “literally only katy perry could make going to space underwhelming.”
Perry came in for some mockery, too, when images of her kissing the ground after touchdown circulated online. “Girl your ass went to see the cloud, your ass didn’t see the space sit down,” an X user replied to the picture punctuating their comment with several sobbing emojis. An equally unimpressed party remarked, “oh dramatic u were there for 20 seconds miss girl.”
Reports that Perry would sing aboard the spacecraft also occasioned a few cracks at her expense. Replying to a clip of King confirming that Perry had sung “What a Wonderful World” after their zero-gravity experience, an X user quipped, “no wonder they came back so quickly,” racking up more than 140,000 likes on the post. One viewer following a BBC broadcast of the event noted an unfortunate bit of timing a few minutes after launch: Right after an anchor said, “Katy Perry did say that she is going to sing in space” came apparent mission audio of someone saying, “One minute warning.” A BBC broadcaster shared the clip, adding, “Seems a bit harsh on Katy Perry.” (Perry explained to reporters that she had chosen “What a Wonderful World” instead of one of her own songs because “it’s not about me,” adding, “it’s about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it.”)
Once footage from the crew’s time floating in space was released, sharp-eyed observers realized that Perry, in addition showing off a daisy to the camera — brought in honor of her four-year-old daughter, Daisy — had flashed a butterfly-shaped cutout that revealed the setlist for her upcoming Lifetimes Tour, which kicks off on April 23. While a few acknowledged this as a canny marketing move, many rolled their eyes. “Goes to space and spends all her time looking at the camera,” wrote one critic. Another Ariana stan went for the jugular, posting, “Wait this is actually legendary promo… it would have made so much noise had it been a relevant artist.”
Still, as the haters downplayed Perry’s astronaut adventure (and took shots at 143, her poorly received album from last year), she did claim a significant victory: the Blue Origin rocket hadn’t exploded, as would-be prophets had darkly speculated it might. “If Katy Perry die they’re gonna play firework everywhere that’s fucked up,” an X user wrote on Sunday in a viral post. But even her safe return wasn’t quite enough to stop all the social media riffs: “Starting a conspiracy that the katy perry who came back from space isn’t the same one who went up,” one person announced. These days, it seems that Perry can roar, or soar — she just can’t win.
From Rolling Stone US
