Katy Perry’s extraterrestrial pursuits should come as no surprise to those of us who may or may not have been diehard fans of the pop star when “E.T.” (featuring the artist formerly known as Kanye West) reached Earth in 2011.
Foreshadowing her minutes-long Blue Origin voyage into space this morning, April 14, Perry’s over-a-decade-old music video for “E.T.” imagined the musician floating in space, coated in thick white foundation and a helical headdress.
This morning, however, Perry wore a form-fitted blue jumpsuit, matching five other high-profile space tourists, including television host Gayle King, Jeff Bezos’s fiancé Lauren Sánchez, rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and activist Amanda Nguyen. Unfolding over a comically brief 11 minutes in a Tic-Tac mint-shaped vessel owned by Bezos’s company Blue Origin (remember those memes?), Perry’s real-life journey to space flopped in the public eye as hard as her seventh studio album 143 (2024).
Memers and opinion columnists unleashed a torrent of humorous criticism at Perry almost instantly after the team’s landing. Perry, more than the others, seems to represent a burgeoning billionaire-funded interstellar tourism movement that abandons the 20th-century pretense of research and innovation and instead openly embraces the whims and wants of the rich and famous.
But in a press conference nearly four times longer than the trip, the women defended the journey as a heart-opening experience and advocated, albeit abstractly, for the care of planet Earth.
The spectacle comes days after the Guardian obtained documents revealing the Trump administration’s plans to gut funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), specifically targeting climate science-related projects.
Blue Origin declined to disclose to CNN just how much the space journey cost, but said that some in the group of all-female passengers paid for their seats, and others were offered a free ride.
After kissing the ground upon landing, Perry told reporters that she sang Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” at zero gravity, which memers joked explained the brevity of the journey. As expected, Perry confirmed she would write a song about the experience, which no one asked for.
Perry also took the sans-gravity opportunity to announce the setlist for her upcoming global “Lifetimes” tour. That PR stunt also flopped when fans realized that the list she held up on a tiny paper butterfly was illegible.
When she landed, Perry said she’d wanted to “model courage and worthiness and fearlessness,” and in an earlier interview with the Associated Press last week, the internet cringed as the pop star said she had been excited to “learn more about STEM and just the math about what it takes to accomplish this type of thing.”
Not only were the passengers of Blue Origin’s flight celebrities, but on the ground, Oprah Winfrey and a selection of the Kardashians commemorated the flight. Oprah looked up to the sky from the launch site with a saccharine gaze, hands to her face; as some users online pointed out, the possibility of a new Oprah meme may just be the best thing to come out of this whole thing.
As Guardian opinion writer Zoe Williams put it, “It’s framed as a feminist statement, and I guess we’re supposed to rejoice that space is no longer pale, male and stale.”
“But something about the randomness of the guest list, coupled with the fact that they all have such nice hair, just … I don’t know … gives an impression of the gender that’s a bit incomplete,” Williams wrote.
Katy Perry’s decision to pop into space seems to have stemmed more from a desire to secure the “highest highs” than an obligation to save the world. Some self-awareness would have been good. Perhaps she took her own lyrics a little too seriously:
’Cause, baby, you’re a firework …
Make ’em go, “Oh, oh, oh”
As you shoot across the sky …
