The pop star’s curiosity, wonderment, and bravery set a good example and may contribute to future human ventures in space.
What do Joe Rogan, Martha Stewart, and the burger chain Wendy’s have in common? They count themselves among the many who have mocked Blue Origin’s all-female trip to suborbital space — specifically, one of the mission’s most famous participants, the pop singer Katy Perry.
Why was Perry singled out for mockery when some of her fellow passengers have similar claims to fame and are objectively more mockable? Perry might have made it easy on her critics when she described herself and her crewmates as “astronauts.”
There are precious few opportunities for the secretary of transportation to engage in the kind of aggressive cultural combat that is currency within the Trump administration, and Sean Duffy jumped at this chance:
“The crew who flew to space this week on an automated flight by Blue Origin were brave and glam, but you cannot identify as an astronaut,” Duffy wrote. “They do not meet the FAA astronaut criteria.”
He’s right about that. “Astronaut” is a word with a definition, and the valor associated with that status should be closely guarded. Perry and her crewmates do, however, have a license to call themselves pioneering space tourists. That’s no small thing.
Today, at the dawn of the age of commercial space exploration, only a handful of people on the planet can claim to have helped open the final frontier to enterprise. The edge of the atmosphere is a hostile environment, and achieving escape velocity remains a dangerous endeavor. Perry’s sojourn was not without serious risk. What’s more, to the extent that her example proves the concept of commercial space travel for potential investors and would-be customers, her contribution to that incipient industry is valuable.
Author and conservative futurist James Pethokoukis made the case:
The “overview effect”— that profound cognitive shift experienced by astronauts when beholding Earth from orbit — merits wider dissemination. A bit of empirical evidence bolsters its significance: a 2018 survey of 39 astronauts revealed measurable changes in environmental attitudes and subsequent activism. Even virtual simulations induce minor cognitive shifts resembling the genuine article. Were millions of us to experience this transformation of perspective, humanity might undergo a collective awakening toward real planetary stewardship and techno-solutionism — a most welcome and needed shift for our fractious species.
Sean Duffy’s valid critique of Perry’s understandable but heedless exuberance wasn’t the only criticism she faced. The pop icon has been accused of contributing to the destruction of the planet, of consuming resources better invested in anti-poverty programs, and of congratulating herself on her achievement in an unctuous manner. In essence, Perry has found herself on the receiving end of the perennial left-wing critique of space exploration: It’s costly, it’s worthless, and it detracts from progressives’ ability to commandeer and disburse other people’s money as they see fit. “The moldy argument remains unchanged: solve problems here before venturing there,” Pethokoukis wrote. “But it’s a false choice.”
Indeed, it is. Space tourism is likely the first step on the road to space-based commercial transport. That enterprise and the profits from it will beget orbital industries that provide advantages unavailable to their terrestrial counterparts, like low gravity, near-vacuum conditions, and all but total isolation. From there, the imagination reels. Will orbital hotels be next? Moon missions that develop commercial applications for the materials found in lunar regolith? Speculative efforts to finance unmanned ventures to the mineral-rich asteroid belt? It all sounds somewhat science-fictional. But then, so, too, did the prospect of launching gyrating pop stars and morning talk show hosts into the outer atmosphere.
For the sin of contributing to mankind’s destiny in space, Perry’s fellow celebrities should not have made her feel as bad about herself as they did. One of her unnamed associates told reporters that she regrets making a “public spectacle” out of her voyage into space. “The unnamed insider also claimed that Perry ‘regrets sharing the daisy with the world,’ referring to a symbolic flower she brought to space in a tribute to her four-year-old daughter, and she ‘wishes the video footage from inside the pod was never shown,’” Yahoo News reported.
Perry has nothing to regret. Emily Ratajkowski may not comprehend the contributions her exercise in space tourism has made to the advancement of a nascent enterprise that heralds the prospect of civilizational advancement and the prosperity that tends to accompany similar epochal developments. Perhaps that’s no surprise. The rest of us, however, should be expected to strive to have at least as much intellectual curiosity and wonderment as Katy Perry.