On the Starry, Spacey Spectacle of the New Shepard Mission


Yesterday an Amazon package was successfully delivered to the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space: The prime delivery, from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space-tourism program, saw his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, and an all-female crew—including singer Katy Perry and TV host Gayle King—rocketed to space for a three-minute float (and a rousing rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” by Perry). Earthbound stars—Oprah Winfrey, Kris Jenner, and Khloé Kardashian—gathered to watch one small step for the planet’s first billionaire girls’ trip.

Lots of people want to hate on the voyage, and I get it. We have so many issues on terra firma—war, genocide, famine, to name but a few—and the space hop feels like a commentary on humankind’s inability to focus on our earthbound problems, to gaze instead at the stars. Monday’s flight cost the annual GDP of a small country, but as Winfrey sagely put it yesterday, “Life is about continuing to grow into the fullest expression of yourself.”

The mission represented the first time an all-female space crew has gone to space since 1963, a genuine feminist achievement—and yet it’s impossible to sidestep the deep commerciality of the stunt: the souvenirs readily available online, Sánchez’s well-publicized Skims under her space suit. In space, no one can hear you scream, but someone was recorded saying, “I love you, Jeff Bezos” in the outer atmosphere.

And so to Katy Perry. It’s been impossible to avoid the breaking news of a songstress in space, the final frontier for pop. And it’s hard to know how to feel about Perry’s interstellar jaunt, isn’t it? Like Perry herself, it’s kinda mega and kinda goofy, inarguably epic but sort of…silly? Holding up a daisy (her daughter’s name) to the heavens is silly, kissing the ground on reentry is silly. And yet it’s all very sincere. Orlando Bloom and Daisy waiting back on the tarmac was heartwarming.

There’s something inexorably romantic and swashbucklingly adventurous about commercial space travel—about normal people, non-astronauts like you and me, well, being astronauts. Perry talked of us all being “made of stardust” (sigh), but she’s not wrong; there’s a universality to our wondrous regard for space. We’ve all been kids trying to fathom the vastness of it; we’ve all been kids trying to understand our own smallness in relation. We’ve all been kids who looked up and marveled.



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