I.
Such a sight to see
And it’s all for me.
Are you brave enough to let me see your peacock?
II.
Last week, Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, announced an all-female crew for its 11th human spaceflight, dubbed “Missions NS-31,” which is scheduled for sometime this spring. The crew includes—stars?—Katy Perry.
Wait, what?
III.
Tech moguls and successful entertainers have, in the past decade, become a spacefaring class.
Four years ago, Bezos shot William Shatner into space, 63 miles above the Earth, alongside three tech and aerospace professionals, on board Blue Origin NS-18. To think, at the height of the U.S. space program in the 1960s, career astronauts spent two years in intensive training before they were cleared to embark on their first mission. Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic have made space tourism an attainable reality for the rich—and a reality spectacle for the rest of us.
You might’ve viewed the immiseration of NASA and the transformation of spaceflight into a luxury good as a decidedly dystopian development. But surely you’d temper your cynicism for Captain Kirk, that classically heroic avatar of interstellar adventure, and, really, who could deny the cultural significance in the old man Shatner living to explore space, however briefly? Who could deny the civilizational advancement of being able to casually send a 90-year-old actor on a suborbital mission with only a couple days of training? It’s not Apollo 11, but it’s something—a reinvigoration of the promise of space exploration as something that we (or at least our descendants) might all get to do at some point, at scale. And, obviously, Bezos sending Shatner to space was invaluable publicity for Blue Origin, which is ultimately in the business of booking seats.
For whatever it’s worth, Shatner has since written about his trek across the Kármán line filling him with “overwhelming sadness” and “dread,” as the notoriously awesome view of Earth tends to overwhelm observers with all sorts of societal concerns. “Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands,” Shatner wrote in his 2022 memoir, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder. “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” It’s such an eloquent reflection, illuminating the fact that our reckoning with the final frontier comes with physical, technological, and political challenges, yes, but also emotional, spiritual, and existential ones.
So now we’re sending Katy Perry to space.
Wait, wha—
IV.
Aren’t you lonely
Up there in utopia?
V.
“If you had told me that I would be part of the first ever all-female crew in space,” Katy Perry posted on Facebook, “I would have believed you.” This is classic Katy Perry, overflowing with empowerment, as jazzed as any kid would be to learn that they’re going to fucking space. I don’t want to ruin the sentiment by pointing out that NS-31 is not, in fact, “the first ever all-female crew in space” but rather the latest all-female crew since Valentina Tereshkova flew solo for the Soviets in 1963; Katy Perry is a pioneer and an inspiration in her own right. “Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child,” she wrote. “Although we didn’t grow up with much, I never stopped looking at the world with hopeful WONDER!”
The crew also includes CBS News anchor Gayle King; Bezos’s fiancée, Lauren Sánchez; film producer Kerianne Flynn; and a couple of aerospace professionals, Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen. But Katy Perry is effectively the celebrity mascot of Mission NS-31, like Shatner to NS-18—except Katy Perry is a hilariously perplexing, out-of-nowhere selection. Why is Katy Perry our emissary to the heavens? What kind of message is Bezos sending us, never mind the aliens?
In this context, Katy Perry is both kinda random, as a pop star who is now more than a decade removed from the peak of her powers, and also kinda perfect, as a luckless late-career diva who is iconically, if also annoyingly, prone to these sorts of stunts. Katy Perry is a kaleidoscope, a hitmaker who proudly approaches pop performance as a sort of circus. She’s lowbrow. She’s “childlike,” by her own admission. Her reissue of Teenage Dream is titled The Complete Confection, and that about sums her up. She’s unmatched, for better or worse, in her whimsy, in her frivolity. She’s the pop star who notoriously asked Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Is math related to science?” And now she’s headlining a billion-dollar mission to space.
At auction, Blue Origin tickets have gone for as much as $28 million. Bezos comped Shatner, though, for the obvious reason: His participation was the best publicity that money could buy.
Katy Perry, though—hmmm—I don’t think I’m alone in not being entirely sure why we’re sending her to space. And I say that as a stalwart fan of Katy Perry, despite myself. (I stand by “Bon Appétit” to this day.)
Her star has certainly dimmed in the decade since her beautifully goofy and admittedly awesome halftime show at Super Bowl XLIX. I’d pinpoint the turn in her reputation as the promo for her fifth album, 2017’s Witness, when she sequestered herself at the Kim Sing Theater in Los Angeles for four days and livestreamed her housebound antics on YouTube. Ultimately, Witness World Wide was a sort of one-woman season of Big Brother; she hosted a contentious dinner with Caitlyn Jenner and sat for a podcast referendum on cultural appropriation with DeRay Mckesson. Witness was an eminently forgettable pop album, but Witness World Wide was one of those indelible demonstrations of the social media age giving us perhaps a little too much insight into the whimsy of our celebrity class.
It was at this point that Katy Perry went from being a benign figure who mainly irritated evangelical Christians to being a low-grade nuisance to even her longtime fans.
Katy Perry is a pop star betrayed by time. A grateful generation once happily nodded along to “California Gurls” and smirked at her cartoonish choreography with Sharks Left and Right, but now we all seem to have decided that, actually, Katy Perry is a little too vapid, a little too wide-eyed, a little too playful, a little too childish. Every generation, I’m convinced, must ritualistically disown some number of its defining stars and performatively outgrow some portion of its formative entertainment. Katy Perry is one such scapegoat for the late 2000s and the early 2010s, a woman who’s now safe to blame for everything from the excesses of poptimism to the failure of Clintonism.
Her most recent album, 143, sold a minuscule 48,000 equivalent album units in its first week, a far cry from 2010’s Teenage Dream, which debuted with 192,000. 143 faced the most uniformly negative reception of any major pop album in recent memory. The lead single, “Woman’s World,” was an uncanny throwback to the girlboss era, and the album more broadly was regarded as an unwelcome attempt to revitalize pop signatures of the previous decade, better left to fade.
VI.
They say you know when you know.
I don’t know.
VII.
So, yeah, I have no idea why Jeff Bezos is launching Katy Perry, of all people, into space, or how historians will one day interpret this deeply bizarre chapter in our history. This has the potential to be a strangely fitting anticlimax, though, to a derailed stardom that in recent years has become less about music and more about cringeworthy stunts of the social media age: a very ceremonious capstone to an era that millennials have been trying to disavow for more than a decade now.
And so we’re shooting Katy Perry into space. Ahh—I see—maybe Bezos gets it after all.
