By Jane Wilde
Humor Editor
A television news host, a journalist, and a pop star walk into a space capsule. No, I am not trying to tell you a joke; this really happened. On Apr.14, Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sanchez, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen took off in a space capsule to advertise Jeff Bezos’s new space company, Blue Origin.
One thing particularly entertaining about the space flight is watching the crewmates experience epiphanies a four-year-old would have. After landing, Jeff Bezos’s wife, Lauren Sanchez, told the press that once you see Earth from space, “You look at it and you’re like, wow, we’re all in this together.” This isn’t High School Musical Sanchez, wrap it up. Sanchez’s crewmate and CBS news anchor, Gayle King, added,“You look down at the planet and think, ‘that’s where we came from?’” Looks like Socrates is in the house, everybody!
When asked what inspired her to go to space, Katy Perry said that she was excited by the “STEM of it all” and that she found astrology riveting, a concept that has little to nothing to do with astrophysics. It looked like she was being interviewed for a job that she has zero experience for. Who’s going to tell her that her rising sun Pisces birthmark won’t help her become an astronaut?
When the capsule landed, Perry kissed the ground and raised a daisy to the sky as if she were an astronaut coming back from a six month-long research expedition. She was up there for 11 minutes. 11 minutes! I’ve been stuck in a drive-thru line longer than that. Perry talked about her 11-minute journey to space like a veteran recalling their experience in war. Upon landing, she remarked, “I feel super connected to love…this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you and how loved you are.” 11 million dollars and 5,000 kilograms of fossil fuels later and she feels connected to love? Post-flight Perry also told Good Morning America, “I hope they can understand that we weren’t just taking up space, we were making space for the future…this wasn’t a ride, it wasn’t a destination, it was a journey.” Each interview sounded like an incoherent attempt at trying to sound poetic and deep.
Perry claimed the daisy she held up in space was not only a tribute to her daughter named Daisy, but a tribute to Mother Earth herself. She said that the flower serves as a reminder to nurture Earth, “to appreciate it and remember it, take care of it and protect it,” directly after releasing tons of fuels into Earth’s atmosphere for the sake of an advert for Jeff Bezos’s space tourism company. Doesn’t seem very nurturing to me. On the descent back to Earth, Perry sang Billy Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” to the crew. I don’t know what’s more terrifying: the singing or the capsule plummeting at extreme speeds to its landing. From the ridiculously dramatic preparation, the announcement of her world tour written on a plastic butterfly that she showed to the camera in space, and her acting as if she’d just returned from the battlefield, this entire flight felt like one giant SNL skit.