If you’re not living in a cave, you know that yesterday a Blue Origin spaceship (owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) catapulted Katy Perry into the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space. The singer joined Bezos’s fiancé Lauren Sanzhez and a slew of other prominent women on the journey, which was branded a form of female empowerment; a publicity stunt designed to pique young women’s interest in science.
Given the state of the world, the journey has sparked frustration on the internet, with multiple celebrities including Emily Ratajkowski and Olivia Wilde (and several million normies) criticizing it for its monetary excess and environmental repercussions.
Indeed, amid the war on Gaza, the famine in Sudan, ongoing climate change, and the impending recession in a host of countries across the globe, the mission’s exorbitance and ties to celebrity culture brought the existing class war into sharp relief, calling to mind the accusations that pop culture is often used as a distraction tactic during times of upheaval (which in this case, would make literal sense: Bezos is a friend of Trump’s, and the tariffs were the last thing on our minds as Perry skyrocketed past the ozone layer.)
But people’s disillusionment with space tourism is nothing new: since space travel graduated from being a form of scientific exploration to a status symbol for the hyper-wealthy, people have criticized it for its blatant excess (as observed by The Atlantic, "the space-tourism industry may be drifting toward its private-jet era." After all, traveling to space is expensive: although we don’t know the price of this particular trip, a Space X one in 2021 cost an insane $220 million. And this journey—which was essentially just for fun (and content) and wasn’t for the purpose of scientific discovery—has come at a time when, as Olivia Munn remarked, “Some people can’t even afford eggs.”
Space travel also has a detrimental impact on the environment: spaceships emit nitrogen oxide (which destroys the ozone layer), water vapor (which causes the earth’s temperature to rise), and soot particles (which contribute to global warming). So the trip being branded as an appreciation of Mother Earth (Katy Perry sang “What a Wonderful World” as the rocket ascended) added insult to injury. As Ratajakowski remarked on TikTok, “That space mission this morning? That’send-times s**t – like, this is beyond parody. Saying that you care about Mother Earth and it’s about Mother Earth, and you’re going up in a spaceship that is built and paid for by a company that’s single-handedly destroying the planet,” she said, referring to the irony of the expedition given Amazon’s impact on the environment. To many, it feels like space tourism allows the rich to colonize other planets while they continue to pillage our own. Only now, they’re using celebrity culture and feminism as the guise under which to do it.
At the end of the day, the space trip was another example of pop culture and the class war colliding and the dissonance that creates. In the modern world The Met Gala is been compared to The Hunger Games, Luigi Mangione is a celebrity-cum-leftist icon, and the rich splash out thousands on Vegas Superbowl tickets in a city with one of the worst rates of homelessness in the U.S. But although the journey felt dystopian, it’s faith-inducing to see celebrities traveling to space and branding it a feminist act has led to backlash, and that we’re not taking it lying down, and the internet (for all its faults) is allowing our voices to be heard.
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